Travis County Commssioners Court
December 17, 2002
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Item 30
30. Consider request of a travel reimbursement, allowing reimbursement to an employee who did not attend conference due to unanticipated job requirements
>> who is here on this one?
>> 30.
>> good afternoon, alicia perez, executive manager for administrative operations. You have before you an item that is a request to approve a travel expense for one of my employees who -- who did not make the trip. In fact they were requested -- I requested them to stay because there were several issues that were coming up at that time and there -- their particular responsibility and level of their job required them to be heres as opposed to travelling at that particular time. As the memorandum states, this is an '03 expenditure -- this is an '02 expenditure, the budget rules did not allow for any cancellation because of emergencies. Since then, the court in the f.y. '03 budget rules has changed that to allow for -- for people cancelling trips, if indeed there was an emergency.
>> > question: I fullied in related to airlines having cancellation issues related to you buy a ticket and that's it and you know that buying certain kinds of tickets that you can't get a reimbursement. I'm agents confused by -- mid in -- I'm a little confused, my understanding is this was a prepaid hotel. Most hotels do not have that kinds of strict cancellation. I'm just wondering when did you all cancel this and was that not sufficient for the hotel to go ahead and give full credit and you are allowed to cancel without there being an issue? Generally hotels are not that strict.
>> let me have someone who can answer that to come up.
>> commissioner, the hotel has a 72 hour cancellation policy.
>> what now, how many hours.
>> 72 hour cancellation policy. And it was not known until the 72 hour period had passed that the employee would not be able to make that trip. So it was within the 72 hour cancellation period that the cancellation was made.
>> is there a piece of paper that says if you told this particular employee, it's not going to happen, we basically can know that the 72 hour test was met? There's not one that -- but I can attest to that, I'm willing to sign an affidavit.
>> move approval of the item 30.
>> second.
>> 72 hour cancellation means 72 hours or more you notify them and get your money back. Less than 72 hours, you don't get your money back.
>> that's correct.
>> we turned this down, it came through our office. The overriding issue on this is if the county did not receive benefit for it, you can't pay for it. We had many, many of these. So this would not be an individual vote that you will be making. There will be many more coming up. In this case there was an airline ticket paid for in advance, we have not received the payment for that, in general when people do that and cancel they pay the county for the ticket and of course the county did not get reimbursed for the hotel. These are really scrutinized because these amounts -- things are tight here and when you make a reservation for a trip, you really need to be sure you can make it because it's difficult to explain when the county spends $317 for a motel and buys an airline at the time and nothing came of that. I want to alert you if you approve this we will certainly pay it. But I think you can expect others to come forward from f.y. '02 with the same request.
>> this is down as $111, not 317.
>> > that was for the room. The 111 is for the room expense.
>> [multiple voices]
>> airline ticket associated with it, yes.
>> it was 163 airline ticket attached to it that was paid in advance. His hotel check basically was made to the hotel and we have not received this check back yet. And the 111 was for the one night no-show that they charged for that purpose.
>> wait a minute, am I confused about something. This is a person supposed to be going somewhere for the county, made the necessary arrangements, the county asked that they -- or insists that they not go.
>> that is correct.
>> that is correct.
>> well, I mean, my gosh. I mean, how can you turn -- if we have got a slot of -- a slew of those things coming in, then we need to take that into consideration when we ask somebody. But to ask an individual to go and to make their reservations to be responsible enough to -- if you do it early enough you get, you know, good prices and yada yada, and then all of a sudden because of county business of whatever they are told that they can't go, that would be pretty amazing from me. Let me ask it in a different way. Is there any possibility that somebody else could have gone in place of this individual to this conference, in which case you would still get the county benefit --
>> there were two employees who did attend this event. I might mention that this particular conference was scheduled to be held September 25th through the 26th. It was anticipated that -- that the department would have been completed with all of its budget related issues. The trip was not frivolously cancelled, but there were multiple business items that put that demand in place. The department was faced with executing your r.i.f. Actions, it was also confronted with the constable van's issues that we brought before you today. There were a number of issues associated with the recruiting of the executive manager for justice in public safety, there were multiple issues associated with the court's decision to change the pay determination policy that's we were looking with. There were a number of others. Contracts that we were bringing forward to you through the risk management unit for approval. It was all within that week. So -- so as we-- as these actions were coming forward, they were unanticipated actions that we had made the commitments to make the trip, not knowing that these items would surface.
>> I think they ought to be brought on the court on a case-by-case basis.
>> all in favor of the motion? Show commissioners daugherty, Davis, your truly voting in favor.
>> voting against?
>> I'm not either. I have not gotten the answer to the question that I asked. I'm happy to vote for this as soon as I get the answer to this question.
>> it's $111.
>> it's not $111, it's also --
>> it's $111 is what my backup says.
>> was there the opportunity for somebody else to go in this particular person's place and the answer is either yes or no and if the answer is no, I'm happy to vote for this. That's all that wasn't to know.
>> the answer is no, commissioner Sonleitner.
>> I vote for this motion. That's all that I was trying to find out.
>> let me ask one other thing to find out. So individuals make -- so individuals make their arrangements on their credit card, they do that because they want the miles or do we have a policy -- because if this happened to me, I would be coming to wherever, maybe it's sid, say, I want to buy this airline ticket, how do you do this.
>> it varies, commissioner. We are very respectful of what both the commissioner and judge had to say. If someone can replace the individual, we did that last week. We had an individual who could not attend, we send someone else in their stead. The airline tickets now with the new policies are non-refundsable, you only have like 10 days to make the changes. So the airline policies have changed to be very, very restrictive in order of someone -- someone else, but weed in and we are respectful -- we understand and we are respectful of the opinions expressed here
>> thank you all very much.
Last Modified: Wednesday, April 2, 2003 10:25 AM