BALTIMORE (WBFF) — Baltimore’s Board of Estimates quickly approved thousands of dollars in travel expenses from Mayor Brandon Scott’s office, including reimbursements for trips that had already taken place.
Taxpayer advocate David Williams criticized the process, saying, “You have a Board of Estimates that rubber stamps everybody’s travel. In some cases they approve travel after the fact.”
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The board approved more than $12,000 in expenses for travel that was completed nine months ago. City staffers are required to get approval before their travel begins, not after, but those expenses were included among more than two dozen expense reports from the mayor’s office, which were approved without discussion.
Among the approved travel was a trip sending one staffer to the Atlanta Jazz Festival costing more than $1,600. The city said the trip would provide an “opportunity to observe a large-scale event operating in a park setting.”
Another staffer traveled to Dallas at a cost of more than $1,100. The city said the visit to the Downtown Partnership would “help understand how they interface with their data.”
Later this month, a City Hall contingent is scheduled to travel to Las Vegas for a shopping center convention. The board approved $7,400 in travel expenses for two members of the mayor’s staff who plan to attend.
“A lot of this could be done virtually or not at all because taxpayers aren’t seeing the benefits from the trips,” Williams insisted.
At City Hall, Scott defended the travel as important for the city’s growth.
“Every mayor, every governor in the country is there and if we don’t want these other cities and states to eat our lunch, we have to be there,” the mayor said.
An investigation by The Baltimore Sun found the city spent $1.8 million in employee travel last year.
Williams predicted the city’s travel budget will continue to rise, saying, “This problem is snowballing and each year the mayor’s office adds more and more people and that adds thousands or millions to the budget that doesn’t need to be added.”
