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The board that oversees the California High-Speed Rail Authority voted Friday to rein in Chief Executive Ian Choudri’s contracting authority following a state investigation that showed consultants billed the agency $600,000 in questionable travel expenses.
The investigation by the office of inspector general for the high-speed rail project found that some consultants flew first class, hailed luxury rides and traveled to a night club, a cigar lounge and numerous restaurants, bars and residences, sometimes after hours, on taxpayers’ dime.
Investigators looked at travel expenses submitted by four consulting firms over a two-year period and found that most of the trips were unauthorized, poorly justified — at times at the agency’s top executives’ request — and that agency staff failed to sufficiently vet the requests before approving them.
The board on Friday voted 7-2 to strip Choudri of his sole authority to sign and manage contracts under $25 million and to require the agency’s in-house attorneys to approve or change any new or existing contracts. The board already has to vote to award any contracts over that amount.
Board chair Steve Kawa told reporters afterward that the decision “adds additional eyes and ears and authority” over issues exposed by the investigation.
“We are not just gonna sit back and ignore that we had this travel issue,” he said. “Not one dollar of California taxpayer dollars should be misused.”
Several board members slammed the consultants for the travel expenses. Lynn Schenk, who has served on the board since 2003, said the spending suggests a troubling pattern and deserves a deeper dive.
“I am outraged that we would be treated like a piggy bank for these kinds of expenditures,” she said during the board meeting. “And it says to me that there are other expenditures that are being treated this way.”
But they did not grill the authority’s top executives for failing to catch the behavior, even though the probe revealed that consultants told agency staff many times that they were traveling at the request of the agency’s top officers, including Choudri.
In response to the investigation, the authority paused all travel payments to the four consulting firms in question and has started reviewing their claims and training staff, executives and consultants on travel policies, said the authority’s Chief Financial Officer Jamey Matalka.
The agency is seeking to recoup all questionable travel payments, he told the board Friday.
“We remain committed (and) we take full responsibility and accountability to fix if there was something broken in the system,” Choudri told the board Friday.
This is a developing story.
