His Share of the Take

The CEO of Valley Metro, Steve Banta, “went golfing on workdays, took 50 days off that did not count as vacation time, flew first class and failed to provide documentation for his expense reports,” says the Arizona Republic. Banta and his wife spent $26,000 of taxpayer money flying 56 times between Portland and Phoenix for “relocation-related trips.” A city auditor found $272,449 in “unallowable or questionable” expenses.

After the Republic revealed these excessive expenses, Banta, who previously worked for Portland’s TriMet, resigned. But then he changed his mind and, when Valley Metro’s board wouldn’t give him his job back, hesued Valley Metro for “wrongful termination and breach of contract,” asking for $1.65 million. The case was settled last week: without either side admitting any wrongdoing, Valley Metro will give him $125,000 severance pay.

Strangely, the Republic blames Banta’s behavior on Valley Metro, which “created a system that allowed him to” do these things. But that’s not really fair. On one hand, the public has a right to expect that any public official who is paid $265,000 a year will be honest in their use of taxpayer money. On the other hand, the real problem is that Valley Metro, like TriMet and so many other rail transit agencies, has become a giant scheme for transferring billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money to the pockets of rail contractors, manufacturers, and operators. It is only natural that agency officials seeing all that money going out the door for truly trivial transportation benefits would want to get their fair share of the take.

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Banta may still be liable to criminal charges. But, as a Portland transit watchdog says, his real problem was that “he didn’t take the necessary precautions to cloak the excesses of his office.” Instead of padding his expense account, he just should have held out for a larger salary and more perks.

For example, the head of Sound Transit, Seattle’s version of Valley Metro, gets $298,000 a year plus an automatic 5 percent annual pay raise plus up to 10 percent more annual raises based on meeting “performance goals” (like convincing voters to agree to the largest property tax increase in Washington history), 30 days of annual paid vacation, $40,000 for moving expenses, plus $3,000 per year for “incidentals.” Most transit agency heads also get a vehicle stipend and other benefits. If Banta had been good at his job instead of greedy, he might have eventually been hired by some other transit agency that would pay even more.

Unfortunately, few in Phoenix will blame this problem on the region’s absurd light-rail program. Instead, due partly to the Peter Principle of transit agencies, they’ll probably just create a lot more red tape which will force the agency to pay its next CEO even more to find someone willing to take the job.