An interim audit report just released by U.S. Department of Transportation Inspector General Calvin Scovel III reveals that members of the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority Board of Directors helped themselves to lavish personal amenities, violated their own contracting policies and thumbed their noses at the public.
The scathing 16-page audit report validates the Federal Transit Administration’s previous misgivings over allowing unelected, unaccountable political appointees with no experience managing a mass transit project to take on the largest such project currently underway in the nation. It also highlights the enormous blunder made by former Gov. Tim Kaine, now a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Virginia, when he handed over the revenue-producing Dulles Toll Road, or DTR, to this board, which had been stacked with out-of-state members.
The year-long investigation, requested by Congressmen Frank Wolf, R-Va., and Rep. Tom Latham, R-Iowa, discovered a culture of cronyism and corruption at MWAA that Wolf rightly calls “completely dysfunctional.”
No-bid contracts? MWAA awarded $6 million worth, despite a federal law that requires all contracts over $200,000 to be competitively bid. Conflicts of interest? MWAA gave a $100,000 sole-source contract to the Chicago-based law firm Jenner & Block, where the wife of a MWAA Board member works. They cited an “urgent need” exception to the law to do this. The “urgent need” was for the law firm to help them justify not seating two new board members appointed by Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, even as board members whose terms have already expired continued to vote.
And not only did the MWAA Board try to block the Inspector General’s access to key documents, but members even had the nerve to discuss how to improve public transparency in a closed-door executive session.
While MWAA Board members were making plans to impose punishing tolls (scheduled to reach $18.75 one-way by 2048) on the 100,000 Northern Virginia drivers who commute along the Dulles Toll Road, they were living it up — spending $4,800 on three dinners in Hawaii, $238 on just two bottles of wine and an outrageous $9,200 for a last-minute, plane ticket to Prague. The MWAA Board also paid a California transit official it was considering as its next CEO, even though he had never worked one day for the authority.
In a May 4th letter to Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, Reston Citizens Association Board member Terry Maynard pointed out that rising tolls will consume nearly half of all gains in DTR commuters’ household disposable income over the next four decades. MWAA’s response? Let’s have a luau!
