Audit Faults City’s Travel Expenditures

Lax oversight of $6.3 million that Los Angeles city officials spent on travel in the last three years led to excessive hotel bills and airfares, City Controller Laura Chick charged Wednesday.

The city’s top auditor said taxpayers should not have paid $385 per night for a hotel room in Santa Barbara and $1,559 for a round-trip flight to Washington, D.C., triple the average cost other city officials paid.

In a report released Wednesday, Chick wrote that her office found “numerous violations of travel guidelines, policies and procedures.”

Councilman Jack Weiss, who had initially asked Chick to look at travel costs just in the Information Technology Agency, said the report was troubling and required action.

“Laura Chick’s report confirms that problems we initially found in ITA are systemic and require a citywide response,” Weiss said. “To the extent there are abuses, they have occurred because of a lack of rigor, a lack of policy and a lack of management.”

In examining 346 trips, Chick said she found travel records were kept inconsistently and manually, making it difficult to track and supervise trips to make sure they complied with city policies.

Chick asked the City Council to adopt major changes in travel practices, including computerization of the process, elimination of cash advances and a requirement that employees provide written reasons when they buy airplane tickets that cost more than the lowest available fares.

City policy requires travelers to book the “lowest regular airfare available,” but Chick said, “In fact, travelers to the same cities frequently paid substantially different airfares.”

The study looked at 22 round-trips to Washington, D.C., by city employees and found the average cost was $553, but the mayor’s office paid $1,559 for Deputy Chief of Staff Nathalie Rayes to fly there in March.

Rayes was part of a seven-person delegation, including Mayor James K. Hahn, that went to the capital to seek legislative help on homeland security and policing issues. Shannon Murphy, a spokeswoman for Hahn, said Rayes decided to go at the last minute, which could have affected the cost.

“We saw the results of this trip when the city was awarded $61 million in homeland security funding this past Friday,” Murphy said.

In addition, backup materials gathered by auditors and released in response to a Public Records Act request from The Times showed Shelley Smith of the Los Angeles City Employees’ Retirement System board got department approval to spend $1,403 on airfare to travel to Washington, D.C., for a conference in February 2003.

City officials also made four trips to Boston, with the cheapest trip costing $425, while the Los Angeles City Employees’ Retirement System paid $1,000 for the same trip.

Chick cited as “an example of an abuse of city funds” one unidentified employee who favored a particular airline and flew to Washington, D.C., for city business but with stops in Miami and Chicago. The airfare on the two trips was twice what co-workers paid to fly directly to attend the same events.

“Travelers appeared to make little or no effort to find the lowest airfare or inexperienced travelers made naive -- expensive -- choices,” Chick wrote.

Chick also discovered that lodging costs varied widely. She looked at 244 trips and found the average lodging cost was $157 per night. LAPD travelers incurred the lowest cost -- $106 -- and pension system officials spent the most -- an average of $203.

Robert Aguallo Jr., general manager of the City Employees’ Retirement System, spent $385 for a room in Santa Barbara, while an LAPD official was able to find one in that city for $128.

Smith, the pension board member, billed the city $356 per night for a hotel in New York City while she attended a 2002 investors conference.

Smith and Aguallo did not return calls seeking comment.

Chick looked at travel by the 40 departments controlled by the City Council, and did not include the harbor, airports and water and power departments, where travel is often more extensive. Her review, she said, was hampered by legal issues involving the Los Angeles City Employees’ Retirement System and the city Department of Pensions, which handles police and fire retirements.

The two pension systems contend that the controller does not have authority to oversee their travel spending because they are not under the City Council’s supervision.

Chick responded that she had found evidence that the Los Angeles City Employees’ Retirement System “rejected efforts by the controller to encourage conformance with the standards established for all other council-controlled departments.”

The controller said Wednesday she hoped the report would lead to reforms that would save taxpayers money on future city travel.