Brown Pays State $1,469 for Travel : Politics: Some of the treasurer’s trips to her vacation home in Idaho were made partly at taxpayer expense. She has also reimbursed the government for other costs.

During her first year in office, state Treasurer Kathleen Brown traveled several times to her Idaho vacation home partly at taxpayers’ expense, state records show. She reimbursed the state for those trips and other personal expenses in February, on the same day she announced her candidacy for governor.

Sources familiar with the Brown campaign said that the inappropriate charges came to light when Brown, like many candidates, asked her state employees and campaign staff to examine all of her expenditures to protect her from embarrassment during the governor’s race.

A review of Brown’s travel claims by The Times shows that she and her staff may have overlooked three other trips with stopovers in Salt Lake City and Chicago, which appear to have involved personal business and which she has not repaid.

Brown said any personal charges to the state were inadvertent but declined to discuss any details of her travel. Campaign aides said the treasurer made the stopovers in Idaho and elsewhere while on otherwise legitimate trips required of her as an officeholder.

They said that in most cases there was little or no added cost to taxpayers and that Brown repaid $1,469--much more than she had to, including the entire air fare or automobile expense, to remove any question about her conduct.

The questionable travel payments were discovered in an audit conducted by the treasurer’s office last year, said Brown campaign press secretary John Whitehurst.

“In any case where there was any extra cost, she reimbursed the whole thing,” Whitehurst said.

He pointed out that the treasurer has renounced many of the traditional perks of statewide office--accepting a 5% salary cut, refusing the services of a state-paid driver and renouncing a $10,000-a-year officeholder account that she once used for catered meals and office receptions.

“She’s really doing more than A, is the law, and B, is the standard, and C, than anybody up there (in Sacramento),” Whitehurst said.

Brown’s reimbursement for the travel expenses was included in a Feb. 8 personal check for $2,990 to the state treasurer’s office.

Of the total returned, $1,355 covered daily allowances for in-state travel--the “per diems” she is entitled to collect while traveling on state business.

In addition, Brown reimbursed the state $129 for a 1991 San Francisco hotel stay. Campaign aides said the treasurer repaid the money because a business meeting the next day was canceled. Also returned: $10 for a carwash, $10 for gasoline and $17 for a “limousine” ride in New York City, which aide Mike Rice said was actually a cab fare.

The return of these expenditures, Rice said, was “a symbol of someone who is concerned that the state money gets spent appropriately.”

In addition to Brown’s personal check to the state, her campaign has written a series of checks to the state treasury totaling $7,310.

Two 1992 checks totaling $3,978 were to reimburse the state for earlier charges made to Brown’s officeholder account. Another check for $332 reimbursed the state for the costs of a reception initially paid for by the treasurer’s office.

Whitehurst said that although all the payments were proper and similar to those charged by other state officeholders--the treasurer had simply decided to do “more that she was required to do. . . . She is setting a standard of excellence in terms of ethics.”

In addition, the Brown campaign has deposited $1,000 a year--a total of $3,000--to cover “miscellaneous non-state charges that inadvertently may be made.”

But it is the added cost of stopovers while traveling on state business that could prove embarrassing to Brown, partly because she waited almost three years to reimburse the questionable expenses.

Among Brown’s trips:

* A February, 1991, stop in Sun Valley, Idaho--where she and her husband own a vacation home--while on her way to a Western State Treasurers’ Assn. conference in Park City, Utah. She claimed no travel expenses while in Idaho. In February, she reimbursed the state $337.50 for the cost of her plane ticket.

* A May, 1991, car trip from Sun Valley to Montana for a conference on pensions, where she was scheduled to speak on a panel that was subsequently canceled. She paid her own transportation costs but reimbursed the state $270 in living expenses.

* In early August, 1991, she flew to Boise, Idaho, from San Francisco after a speaking engagement in Monterey. She reimbursed the state for her $216 plane ticket.

* In late August, 1991, she traveled to New Hampshire for a National Assn. of State Treasurers conference. Instead of flying back directly to Los Angeles, she flew to Salt Lake City, the hub that serves Sun Valley, for Labor Day weekend. Brown reimbursed the state the $646 cost of her plane ticket.

Travel expense claims provided to The Times under the state Public Records Act raise questions about three other trips as well. In each case, interruptions in cross-country travel appear to have added to the cost of her air fare.

In April, 1991, Brown stopped in Salt Lake City on personal business while flying back from a Washington meeting of the Council on Institutional Investors. The total air fare for the trip was $628.

In March and April of 1992, Brown interrupted two cross-country trips to stop in Chicago, where her daughter was expecting a baby. Total air fare for the two trips was $1,609--paid by the treasurer’s office and the State Teachers’ Retirement System. That’s almost $500 more than Assistant Treasurer Beverly Thomas paid for her round-trip tickets to the same two meetings.

Brown campaign spokesman Whitehurst said that the layovers in Chicago “did not cost anything to the state.”

He added that if the three stopovers did add to the state or pension fund’s cost and were inadvertently overlooked in the treasurer’s office audit of expenses, the added amounts would have been covered by the campaign committee’s annual $1,000 payment to the state account.

But the state Political Reform Act generally bars the personal use of campaign funds--limiting spending to costs “directly related to a political, legislative or governmental purpose.”

The records also show that on the personal segments on all these trips, Brown did not bill the state for hotels, meals or other living expenses while in Sun Valley.