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.
