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Late-night, luxury rides to nightclubs, gyms, a tiki bar, and an escape room, all paid for by California taxpayers. A new High-Speed Rail inspector general report found hundreds of thousands of dollars in wasteful and unallowable travel expenses, in some cases approved by the rail authority's CEO himself.
The public might not know any of this without a controversial new law that now requires the inspector general to publish full reports, but that also lets him temporarily withhold certain details.
CBS California's investigation spent months reviewing the controversial bill language, included in Assembly Bill 1608 and later enacted as part of the transportation budget trailer bill. Critics are correct: The bill does create new confidentiality language. Supporters are also correct: The bill also creates first-of-their-kind public reporting requirements.
The question is not simply whether this is a transparency bill or an anti-transparency bill. The real question is: Does the bill's new reporting requirement outweigh the new power to temporarily withhold certain sensitive information? Ben Belnap is California's first inspector general dedicated solely to high-speed rail.
Before taking the job, he spent about two decades at the California State Auditor's Office. He is the kind of auditor who once built a board game to teach staff how to audit.
When Belnap and several longtime colleagues helped launch the new high-speed rail inspector general's office, they quickly identified gaps in the law that created it. One of the biggest involved public reports.
State law required the office to publish an annual summary of its findings and recommendations. It did not require Belnap to publish every completed audit, review, or investigation. Belnap chose to publish full reports anyway.
"I'm not really authorized by anything in state law to produce the reports I have been publishing," Belnap told CBS California Investigates. He was not prohibited from publishing them. But nothing specifically allowed him to do it either. "To the credit of the Newsom administration, they've not called me on that," he said.
The administration ultimately supported making those reports mandatory, incorporating the reporting language into a transportation budget trailer bill that fast-tracked the requirement into law. That distinction matters in the consultant travel investigation.
Without the full 29-page investigative report, the public could have received little more than a summary of the findings and recommendations that wouldn't have been published until next year.
Late-night, luxury rides to nightclubs, gyms, a tiki bar, and an escape room, all paid for by California taxpayers.