District government staff ran up nearly a quarter million dollars in travel expenses through the first three months of the year, spending significant time in Florida, Jamaica and Las Vegas even as D.C. faces a historic economic downturn.
The 594 travel-related charges totaling about $214,000 and expensed on government travel credit cards constitute roughly 6 percent of all purchase card activity in January, February and March.
There are examples of travel frugality — the $10,615 spent on Air Tran flights, for one — but also numerous examples of extravagance.
D.C. Taxicab Commission Chairman Leon Swain charged $1,034 to his card for a multiple-day stint at the Venetian Resort Hotel & Casino, one of the ritziest stays on the Las Vegas Strip. He was attending the “national limo trade fair,” he said Monday, “and that’s where I was.”
Two employees in the Office of Administrative Hearings spent five days in Jamaica, at the Rose Hall Resort and Country Club, for the National Bar Association annual conference, said Chief Judge Tyrone Butler. Total cost to the city: $1,464. Butler paid for the hotel, he said, and the employees financed their travel, food and registration.
The D.C. Department of Human Resource’s substance abuse program manager will spend five nights at Connecticut’s Mohegan Sun casino resort, a $1,114 booking, for the upcoming Drug and Alcohol Training Industry Association’s annual conference, spokeswoman Erica Stanley said.
District employees have traveled far and very, very near.
There was a $705 visit to the Fantasyland Hotel in Edmonton, Canada, by a fire department employee, multiple visits by Department of Transportation staff to “Disneyland Hotels,” and visits by various agencies to Kansas City, New Jersey, Illinois and virtually every other state.
The Office of Property Management, meanwhile, spent $1,750 to charter a bus to transport D.C. Council members from city hall to Capitol Hill on Inauguration Day.
All told, D.C. employees charged about $3.5 million in the first 90 days of the year on a wide variety of items, from office supplies to dry cleaning, catering, printing and pool supplies.
Asked whether D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty has ordered executive agencies to watch their travel budgets, especially now that the government faces an $800 million shortfall in fiscal 2010, Stanley said, “Yes, of course.”
The purchase card data can be found on the District’s Web site. Some of the expenses, said Ward 3 Councilwoman Mary Cheh, are worth investigating.
“If I know about it I’m going to ask questions, because it looks odd on the surface,” Cheh said. “Maybe there’s nothing wrong with it, but it looks odd on the surface.”
