OAKLAND (BCN)
The Alameda County Grand Jury recommended in its annual report today that the city of Oakland adopt more stringent accounting requirements for travel expenses.
The grand jury said much of the travel involves attending out-of-state conferences "with the primary purpose of social networking" that return little, if any benefit, to the city of Oakland, which faces a $100 million deficit for the current fiscal year.
The report, entitled "City of Oakland Excessive Travel Costs," said many of the training courses city employees attended were of questionable value to the city or weren't cost effective.
As an example, it said city employees traveled to Alaska, where one of the courses dealt with teaching "The Art of Eskimo Yo-Yo Making."
The report said on another occasion, 10 employees traveled across the country to attend the "McGruff Crime Dog Conference" designed to improve civilian, non-police department employees with crime-fighting strategies.
The grand jury said a better practice, and one that would provide better value, would be to send one employee to a conference, evaluate the benefits of the training afterward, and then make a decision on whether to present the training session in Oakland at a lower cost and to a wider audience.
The panel said it's especially concerned about the number of employees who traveled to conferences and training sessions that appeared to have little connection to official city business, the number of out-of-state trips taken by employees and the number of days employees spent away from work traveling.
The grand jury said it's also concerned about "the poor documentation employees provided for their travel expenses and the equally poor job their supervisors did in reviewing those expenses" as well as the absence of any review of travel expenses that are paid with city credit cards.
"The credibility of city government becomes questionable when expenses are not carefully scrutinized," the report said.
Grand jurors said the volume of travel to out-of-state conferences and training sessions of questionable value "suggests that a culture has developed among some senior Oakland officials that city employees are entitled to this type of travel as a benefit of employment."
The panel said that belief "should be re-examined and eliminated" because taxpayers deserve value for their dollars.
The grand jury said an example of questionable travel occurred when 27 employees traveled to the Black Public Administrator's Conference in Arkansas at a cost of $55,5000.
The agenda for the conference demonstrated that little time was spent on training or education and most of the sessions revolved around networking, according to the panel.
The report said the Oakland Police Department appeared to be the only city department that is doing a good job at carefully scrutinizing employees' travel expenses.
Grand jurors said the departments with the most travel between July 1, 2007, and June 30, 2008, were the Human Services Department and the Finance and Management Department.
Eighty Human Services employees went on 140 out-of-state trips and were gone a total of 376 days. Seventy-six finance employees went on 146 trips and were gone 419 days.
The report says Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums was one of those who traveled frequently in fiscal 2008, spending $44,025, according to his travel logs.
Dellums spent $1,740 for conference fees, $7,495 for transportation, $25,789 for lodging and $9,000 for meals, according to a city report.
The report says no hotel bills or receipts were provided to the grand jury for Dellums' expenses and the numbers provided to the city don't match credit card charges.
Oakland City Councilman Ignacio De La Fuente said today that he and Councilwoman Jean Quan have tried to impose tougher controls on travel costs but their efforts have been resisted by other council members.
De La Fuente said "there's not even a line-item in the budget" for travel costs.
The councilman said he agrees with the grand jury that it's hard to know exactly how much the city spends for travel costs because some charges that are paid by credit cards aren't included in travel reports.
He said the city's first comprehensive report on travel expenses is expected to be released in September.
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