Vote on request for up to $14K to take place 10 days after manager left
Metro’s board of directors is slated to be asked on Thursday to approve up to $14,000 to send one person on a 12-day trip to the Czech Republic even though the travel is already under way.
The transit agency is asking for permission to approve sending Damon Cannon, a project manager, to oversee the shipment of three D.C.-owned streetcars that have been in storage in the Czech Republic for more than a year. The board is required to approve all international travel — though such approval is supposed to happen in advance.
Yet his trip began Nov. 9, according to agenda materials, and the vote approving it is scheduled to occur 10 days after he left.
“The board meets only once a month, and this request likely came in between board meetings and when the travel was scheduled to take place,” Metro spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein said.
The $14,000 request submitted to the board translates to more than $1,100 per day. A quick search on the online travel site Orbitz showed round-trip airline tickets from Washington to the Czech Republic could be bought for less than $1,100 just a day before the flight. That would leave $1,000 per day for the rest of the trip.
Farbstein said the $14,000 represented an estimate before the trip was finalized. She said the actual cost of the trip will be about $7,860, based on U.S. State Department travel allowances, including $1,774 for the plane ticket, $4,249 for lodging and a total $1,836 per diem. That’s the equivalent of a $386 per night hotel room plus $153 per day for meals and extras. The District is paying the bill, not Metro, because the streetcars are a D.C.-initiated project.
“We will reimburse them but they have to justify the expenses,” said District Department of Transportation spokesman John Lisle. “They have to show why they spent the money.”
The District bought the three streetcars in the Czech Republic but had to store them there when it ran into problems negotiating the route of the proposed Anacostia streetcar line.
This week, DDOT showed pictures online of the streetcars being loaded onto flatbed trucks in the Czech city of Ostrava. The streetcars are being trucked to a port in Hamburg, Germany, where they are to be loaded on a ship.
Cannon is expected to return Saturday; the streetcars are expected to arrive in the Washington area in mid-December for storage in Greenbelt.
But the cars aren’t slated to begin service on the Anacostia line until at least 2012. A second line along H Street is also under construction but does not have a start date.
