RTD's disgusting excess

Face the State produced this great report Friday on the RTD Board of Directors spending of more than $54,000 in taxpayer money to travel to exotic locations, eat at fine-dining restaurants and provide ground transportation to trips just to Denver International Airport.

I am not going to go into a huge amount of specifics here, because Face the State did such a good job of laying it all out at their Web site, which I urge you to read in full.

But RTD directors basically got free hotel rooms, food, transportation and other amenities while on supposed RTD business at various conferences whose value to actual writers is most likely dubious. Some of the more egregious charges are $1,627 for a "China Trip" by District C director Juanita Chacon, the $328 District K Director Noel Busck charged to stay at a beach-front hotel during a San Diego conference, and various charges by directors for transportation and parking for travel to DIA, despite the fact that directors are given full, free transit passes for all RTD services including the Skyride to DIA. 

Though each director's travel budget decreased from $10,000 in 2008 to $7,000 in 2009, the RTD Board just passed a resolution at last Tuesday's meeting increasing the directors' ability to be reimbursed for expenses related to having directors' spouses attend RTD sponsored "events" (parties) for lobbyists and legislators. 

RTD Board of Directors are elected officials. And while they are only given a $12,000 yearly salary, many of them also have jobs as lawyers (or some other upper middle-class job), or are sufficiently wealthy in semi-retirement. Basically, they don't really need to be reimbursed for anything, but us taxpayers are giving them loads of free trips and other goodies. This is happening at a time when RTD is supposedly in a budget crisis, a time when the board is voting to increase fares and cut service. 

If you think $54,000 is not much money in the grand scheme of a huge and unfortunately too-powerful bureaucratic semi-governmental agency, you are wrong. $54,000 is literally enough money to save whole portions of several bus lines the board just cut on Tuesday.  RTD's own calculations show it would save $27,300 for the cuts on route 3LTD, and $22,800 for the cuts on Route 6. Eliminate these ridiculous expenditures and save both of them. 

The RTD Board of Directors are basically stealing taxpayer money at the expense of providing quality service to the actual riders they purport of serve. Simply outrageous!