Traveling on the Taxpayer Dime, City of Sugar Hill Style
As the City proposes a 33.5% increase in its 2023 travel budget, it makes sense to look at the history of the City's travel habits and expenditures.
Travel was the first spending and budget topic I ever investigated in depth when I started following the Sugar Hill government. Before I started my work here, I figured that local government officials worked...you know, locally.
While I can understand the occasional work-related reason to leave the City during the course of the day, overnight trips are rarely, if ever, warranted. And I can't see ANY valid reason Sugar Hill taxpayers should be footing the bill for airfare.
In 2020, I submitted an Open Records Request for all expense reports and travel receipts for 2019. Everything responsive to the request would have cost me over $100. So, I paid half that and got half of the year's records, just to get an idea of what they were doing. I still received a stack of paperwork nearly an inch thick. Had anything responsive to my request painted them in a better light, they could have included it voluntarily. Yet, they did not.
The partial results of those requests showed that not only was the City traveling out of town and out of state, they were traveling extravagantly. Our employees don't fly coach, and they stay in the best (and most expensive) hotels in town.
In 2019, at their annual trip to the Georgia Municipal Association conference in Savannah, Ga, your City of Sugar Hill elected officials and employees chose to stay at the three most expensive hotels on a list GMA provided of local lodging. The rates ranged from $227 to $240 a night, with people staying 3-6 nights.
There were four plane tickets in the records. City Manager Paul Radford and then-Councilman, current Mayor Brandon Hembree flew to Washington DC. Paul Radford and former Mayor Steve Edwards flew to Denver, CO. All tickets were Delta Comfort +, which includes more legroom, a dedicated overhead bin, and complimentary beer. wine, and liquor service. These men are short and don't require extra legroom.
The flight to DC was stated in the associated expense report to be for the Highway 20 pedestrian bridge and the Greenway. There was no indication of why they were flying to Denver, CO. Again, if there were expense reports or paperwork that showed a legitimate reason for the trip, they could have voluntarily provided it. If it existed, the City chose not to share it.
I found one hotel receipt for Former Mayor Steve Edwards for an overnight stay in Bethlehem, GA, which is only about a 35-minute drive from Sugar Hill. Instead, taxpayers paid $132.33 for him to stay overnight.
At their 2019 retreat to Franklin, TN, they rang up bills at the hotel lounge that they were then required to repay to the City (pro tip: tax money should never be used to buy booze). And while I found receipts indicating most had reimbursed the funds, one (Suzie Gajewski Walker) had supposedly repaid her $82.76 tab with $80 cash, coming up short and leaving no proper paper trail to verify her repayment. It all left me wondering why none of them went to the lounge with enough money to pay their own tabs in the first place. And, the even bigger question, how many times had they gone on similar excursions for which they never bothered to reimburse the taxpayer because they figured no one was watching?
To see the full results of my investigation, including all the receipts, visit my blogs: