Good day all. Prior to the current incompetent idiot, Jerry Brown was governor of California. Brown had been Governor of California previously, back in the 70’s and early 80’s. He ran again in 2010 and was elected again. He won reelection in 2014.
Brown had a reputation of being fiscally conservative and creating budgets that ended with surpluses. He did this with no spending and the Democrat standby of tax hikes. However, there was one thing he couldn’t wait to throw buckets of cash at. This was the High Speed rail system. Originally. The train was meant to go from Los Angeles to San Francisco. That idea collapsed for a few reasons and instead it was set up to go from Merced to Bakersfield. Basically nowhere to nowhere.
The railroad has been “Under Construction” since 2015 and honestly, not much has been done other than to see billions of dollars disappear. So much money has been wasted that the Federal Government has cut Kalifornistan off. Now an audit has found where the money, or at least some of it, has gone. Here are the details from Fox Business News:
California High-Speed Rail Authority officials rubber-stamped hundreds of thousands of dollars in travel charges incurred by outside consultants, according to a new report from the state’s inspector general.
The lavish spending revelations come as the $126 billion project has become a national symbol of government waste. Sixteen years after voters approved the initiative, not a single mile of track has carried a commercial passenger, and a recent assessment warned the project’s funds could dry up entirely by the end of 2027.
Not to worry, I’m sure there will be yet another raid on the taxpayers by the Kalifornistan Supreme Soviet, aka the legislature. As to what these conslutants were spending money on? It wasn’t anything to do with high speed rail.
The audit, released Tuesday by the California Office of the Inspector General (OIG), revealed that taxpayers footed the bill for private aircraft travel, tiki bar visits, cigar lounges, luxury rideshares and international trips over a two-year period.
“In total, the Authority paid more than $2 million in travel-related costs for consultants at the four consulting firms in fiscal years 2024-25 and 2025-26,” the OIG said.
Those private business jets are not cheap, but for the elite conslutants, nothing is to good for them in their quest to consult. (And go to tiki bars for business meetings)
The investigation reviewed travel reimbursements billed by four outside consulting firms over the two-year period. It found that roughly 60%, or $680,500, of the payments it reviewed had not received advanced authorization. Additionally, $543,400 in travel expense payments were found to be “not allowable.” In some instances, agency staff didn’t even know the trips had taken place until the invoices arrived, frequently approving them with vague justifications like a “typical M-F week.”
In my real life career, I have had to travel on occasion for business reasons. I had to get approval for the travel from my management and I had to keep receipts. I also had to file an expense report to be reimbursed for my expenses. If I flew, I had to find the cheapest fares I could and stay in approved hotels. It looks like I should have been a conslutant for the Kalifornistan government.
The audit uncovered a lack of oversight, noting the agency’s behavior is “inconsistent with the Authority’s role as the steward of public resources.”
I’m not at all surprised. I’ve seen this in any number of government agencies, especially in Democrat run states. People hired for these agencies are not selected for their competence.
Instead of standard business travel, the audit flagged an array of unauthorized luxury expenditures billed to “questionable locations” without prior approval. Financial consulting giant KPMG LLP was specifically identified by the OIG as the firm that billed the authority for rides to a nightclub, a tiki bar and a Washington, D.C., cigar lounge. Taxpayers were also on the hook for an outing to an escape room, a trip to a Denver sushi restaurant and a 25-mile “Uber Comfort” ride to a steakhouse in Folsom, California.
Those expenses should have bee flagged within minutes of being submitted. In fact, if anyone put in such a report in the Dreaded Private Sector, they would have been paid a visit by management. Years ago, I was on travel from the local office to the corporate office in another state. One of the allowed items on the expense list was business related meals with other, local employees.
I was out after work with others on my team and we were joking about my being there on the company’s dime. I mentioned the part about business meetings and being able to pay for all the meals and then asked what was the best steak house in the city. A very expensive restaurant was named and we started joking about calling our manager and saying that “We’re headed to XYZ for a dinner meeting and AW is going to expense it. Any problems?”
We didn’t do that of course because it would never have been approved and we only told the manager the next day as a joke. He thought about it and said “Well, if you had invited me, I would have approved it.” I was curious and asked what a meal for all of us would have cost and close to four figures was the estimate. This is generally how expenses actually work. What we were joking about was a clear abuse of the system and the costs would have blown way past the daily allowance. Yes, I had one of those when traveling. It seems that this wasn’t the case for the High Speed Rail Authority.
The audit of the reimbursements extended to daily routines and premium transit. The agency repeatedly reimbursed ride-hailing trips to Planet Fitness gyms in and around Sacramento, continuing the practice even after a supervisor explicitly put in writing that the state does not cover rideshares to gyms.
If you tell someone that they can’t expense something and they continue to do it, that person should be terminated and billed for the money that was paid out. Potentially, law enforcement could also be brought in as well. The Dreaded Private Sector won’t hesitate to do any of this since it amounts to fraud.
One consultant billed taxpayers $40 for a luxury “Uber Black” ride to travel less than a single mile in downtown Sacramento.
Unless there was a physical issue that precluded this person from walking, then he or she should have paid for the ride out of his or her own pocket. That or take a bus. (Of course, that would mean that this special conslutant would have to ride with the hoi polloi and that simply won’t do for the elites)
When it came to air travel, one consultant bypassed commercial airlines entirely, flying a private aircraft from Washington, D.C., to California. The consultant self-calculated that a “premium” commercial rate would have cost $4,182 each way, and the agency paid it without question.
That same flight would probably run a few hundred dollars flying coach on a major airline. It should have been flagged and denied.
The billing didn’t stop there. One legal consultant billed $40,800 in travel reimbursements, plus $86,500 just for “travel time,” making 30 trips between Denver and Sacramento in a single year. Furthermore, the agency paid out $118,000 in international travel expenses, despite the consultants’ contracts explicitly barring international trips.
Now I think we’re into flat out fraud territory. At the very least, the contract should have been voided and the conslutant sent packing.
A spokesperson for the California High-Speed Rail Authority said the agency “takes these findings seriously” and has pledged to work collaboratively with the inspector general’s office to rectify the oversight failures.
“More than $600,000 in consultant travel expenses were flagged as questionable, while California families are struggling with the high cost of living and deserve answers and accountability,” the chair of the state Senate Transportation Committee, Tony Strickland, R-Huntington Beach, said in response to the findings. “Consultants should expect that when they make an executive decision to travel without authorization, that they’re taking on the expense themselves.”
There are very rare circumstances when a consultant, or anyone else on a company credit card would need to expense that sort of travel. While I haven’t seen the expense reports, I seriously doubt that there was any such circumstance. This was simply people seeing that there was no real oversight and that they could with pretty much what they wanted. I also blame the financial people in the Authority who’s job it was to look at these reports and ask some serious questions. However, since it was only taxpayers money, they just brought out the rubber stamp.
As to what comes next? The answer is simple. Nothing will happen. Oh there may be a few token repayments, but in general, nothing else will be done. This is why Kalifornistan is nothing more than a failed state, clinging to it’s reputation as having the biggest state economy in the country and most of the world. It will be interesting to watch the wreck when the money is gone and the high speed train to nowhere is finally canceled.
Thatisall
~The Angry Webmaster~
