1. Let’s start with the County – how much did it spend and on what?
A: Clark County spent $2.5 million, $500,000 more than the year before.
Airfare, lodging, registration fees, other travel expenses and training.
The DA’s office spent the most – almost $700,000, followed by Family Services, Fire Dept and IT.
The records are lacking detail – it’s unclear what much of the spending was for specifically.
In most cases, it doesn’t say who traveled or why, it just has amount spent and some spending have no descriptions, while others have vague descriptions like “airfare” “lodging” or “registration” or even “travel.”
We saw this last year too, the County should be more transparent and say who traveled where and for what purpose, like other cities do, we get these records from other cities and they often include which staff member traveled, to which city, which hotel they stayed at, what the conference was.
That’s not an invasion of privacy – the trip already happened, and it happened with taxpayer money.
2. Looking at the school district, that means of the $10 million, they spent over $7 million. Are their records more transparent?
A: Clark County schools records also lack details – it gives which vendor was paid, like the Hilton or United Airlines, but like the county, it doesn’t give any details on who traveled, where or for what purpose.
At least $1.8 million was spent on airfare
$1.5 million at Southwest Airlines
$207,000 at Delta
$77,000 at American Airlines
$59,000 at United
AT least $453,000 for charter buses
$7,400 at the 5-star Ritz Carlon
$11,300 at the 4-star Crowne Plaza
$53,000 at Disney hotels
$367,000 at Hyatt hotels
$347,000 at Hilton hotels
$320,000 at Marriott hotels
and hundreds of thousands more at other hotels
Your viewers may remember last year the Las Vegas Review Journal reported that the district sent a group of 17 recruiters, principals and support staff to Miami Beach, where they stayed in a beachfront hotel.
This raised eyebrows among lawmakers and the public and is why it’s important that the district report this spending.
It’s why all travel records should be available to the public, you shouldn’t have to request a specific small group of people, as the school district told us to do.
Both last year and this year when we asked the district for its spending records, they said the request is overbroad and they couldn’t do it. Both years they ended up giving us the vague records. The year before was $4.2 million. Wouldn’t it be nice to see the details of how and why $7 million was spent last year?
We reached out to both the county and school district for comment.
3. Do other school districts provide this information?
A: Oftentimes.
Metro Nashville Public Schools spent $3.7 million on travel for hundreds of employees last year to cities all over the country.
They provided employee names, who exactly was paid, a hotel, airfare, how much, and not all the records but many said what city they travelled to and what conference they attended.
Austin and Baltimore wouldn’t fulfill our travel request at all, both the city and school. Not even dollar totals. So Clark County is at least better than some others.