By Mike Mibach, KTVU (Click here for Video)
As BART careens towards a possible strike, a KTVU Channel 2 News investigation has found the transit district’s management has spent millions of dollars on trips around the world and the nation and lavish meals at extravagant restaurants.
One expert told KTVU that the system’s tracking of those expenses is the equivalent of throwing receipts in a cigar box.
BART management does not keep an electronic tracking system of its travel or dining and drinking expenses, instead still keeping often incomplete paper receipts in cardboard boxes stored in a government warehouse.
Last January KTVU Channel 2 News, using the California Public Records Act, requested the expense records, which the law states should be made available no later than in 10 days. In June, BART provided 14 large cardboard boxes of paper records, which a KTVU news team spent three weeks examining in detail.
Some of the key findings include:
- A $2,700 tab at Gallagher’s Steak House on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, one of the most expensive steakhouses in the nation. The meal was for 10 BART managers – at $270 a meal – and had no itemized receipt, a violation of BART’s official policy.
- A $751.40 bill for some BART employees, directors – and director’s wives – at a Georgetown restaurant dubbed the “power spot of the year.” The Café Milano bill included wine and even cognac, again against BART’s official policy.
- A $699.51 bill at the University Club, also on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The men’s only organization is akin to San Francisco’s Pacific Union Club, except it is exclusively for invited graduates of Yale University. The meal was said to be a “thank you” to employees of the New York City subway, who gave BART managers a “tour.” Again, no itemized receipt was provided, although as with all the other expenses, BART reimbursed the tab with taxpayer and fare gate money.
There are hundreds of travel expenses that include trips to cities such as London, Paris, Rome, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Sydney and Rio de Janerio, international trips BART policy officially decrees must be approved in advance by BART’s general manager.
There are hundreds of trips across the United States as well, which need a lower level of approval. Some of the dozens of cities visited include New York and Washington, Pittsburgh and Chicago, New Orleans and Seattle, Los Angeles and Omaha.
And BART managers also stay in hotels around the Bay Area. Hotels stays in San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, and Santa Rosa have not been uncommon.
One BART manager rented a room at San Francisco’s Westin Hotel “for staff to change into outfits for parade” during last year’s Gay Pride celebration. Cost to the public: $295.43.
BART managers frequently eat out at public expense. Meals at Bay Area restaurants are not uncommon, such as dining at expensive restaurants as Il Fornaio in Walnut Creek at a cost of $125.57.
Various other expenses were also found in the thousands of paper receipts, expenses such as a tuxedo rental for a former executive at a cost of $109.95, a floral arrangement for $98.43, and water at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco’s Union Square for $81. The total cost for food and drink alone – not associated with any travel – for the nine years between Jan. 1, 2000 and December 31, 2008 was $35,033.90.
Travel came to $2,213,141.22 in the same period.
Robert Paaswell is a former general manager of the Chicago Transit Authority and a world-recognized expert in public transit finance. He says the industry term for keeping good electronic records of expenses is “state of good practice.”
Speaking from his office in Manhattan, Paaswell observed he “would be surprised to hear that someone is essentially keeping their records in a cigar box, which is sort of the picture.”
Paaswell also noted “by law you have to have your financial records in order you have to get by an annual audit if you’re going to get any federal funds.”
BART’s current general manager, Dorothy Dugger, said BART is compliant with federal laws adding “I’m not going to tell you that there hasn’t been a mistake made in eight years but I have a high degree in the accuracy of our accounting.”
Dugger said BART keeps its expense records in cardboard boxes while it tries to muster a $40 million program to use modern spreadsheets such as Excel.
Although many – perhaps a third or more – of BART managers are represented by labor unions such as the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees, AFSCME local 3993 President Jean Hamilton conceded BART’s accounting is “a big black hole of expenditures.”
And although BART’s top management says it has no plans to reform any travel, food, drink or miscellaneous expenses, it does have a list of what it calls important improvements for BART riders it cannot afford.
Those include $1.1 million for backing up PG& E power, $1.3 million for parking garage lighting and stairs costing $1.6 million – all well below the $2.4 million spent in the period examined.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
The discoveries by KTVU regarding BART’s blatant disregard for any kind of cost conscienceness is outrageous!! While we are being held hostage to more and more cost hikes with less services, they spend like they have bottomless expense accounts; I guess they consider the public, their patrons, their bottomless expense account. BART Board members, directors and management should be ashamed of themselves and should be held accountable for this kind of uncontrolled and unchecked spending. BART Board members as elected officials, as well as the management of BART should be held accountable to SOME standards of ethical behavior. This is just another example of how corrosive power & greed are.
There is absolutely no reason why BART Managers should be travelling the globve. Bangkok, Asia, London, Milan, Rome, Paris…? There is no large city on nthe planet that BART Managers Have not visited, and for what? Has anything come back that helps you in your job? No, it’s just perks or something worse that we don’t even want to know about that has nothing to do with running a Transit Agency.
One Management official spent over $150,000 dollars travelling. That’s much more than most of us make, including overtime.
Then BART doesn’t even keep track of it. It’s like this money comes out of the change jar most of us keep at home, except their change jar goes up into the millions of dollars.
Bart Management is out of control and their appears that there is nothing anyone can do about it. If you take the abuses that BART gets away with and multiply that by the thousands of Public Agencies across the nation that are doing the same things, is there any wonder that the country is on it’s backside gasping to survive while our own government officials like the BART Managers destroy the country?
Harry Gordon