You many recall an item here in News & Views where we noted Geoff Dornan of the Nevada Appeal reporting on government employees spending over $3 million last year on 30,000+ airplane tickets. Well, Greg Smith of the of the Purchasing Division of the Department of Administration wrote to clarify those figures a bit.
Mr. Smith explains that the state’s “reporting is done in ‘segments,’ not round trips. So to approximately assess the true number of round trips, you have to divide the reported segments in half. There are one-way trips included in the overall number, but I would think they’re relatively minor in number.”
In other words, there were somewhere around 15,000 round-trip tickets purchased, not 30,000. In addition, Mr. Smith notes that 2007 was a legislative year, so the amount of travel from roughly January through June is heavier than it would otherwise be in non-legislative years.
Which is all fine and good. And I appreciate Greg bringing these factors to our attention. However…
I’ve now quickly scanned some of the purchasing reports and I still want to know which employees are doing all this flying on the taxpayers’ dime and for what purpose. Could these expensive trips been avoided with an inexpensive phone call or teleconference?
But here’s an even bigger question: If there were 30,000 one-way trips on Southwest Airlines, and Southwest gives you a free ticket for every 16 one-way “segments,” what happened to the 1,875 free tickets earned by Nevada’s taxpayers, hmmmm?
I feel a FOIA coming on…
Posted on April 25th, 2008 by Chuck Muth
Filed under: Nevada
2007 legislative year. Southwest flies non-stop LV-Reno. I would bet that many of those segments were non stop. I would bet that most of the rest were non-stop. Vegas to DC? Non-stop.