El Paso County Commissioners consider new travel policies following ABC-7 report on expenses

EL PASO, Texas (KVIA) -- County leaders are looking at increasing accountability and transparency on where elected officials travel and how much they spend.

This follows an ABC-7 Xtra investigation into the nearly quarter of a million dollars of taxpayer funds spent on travel expenses by members of commissioners court over the last several years.

At a special meeting on Thursday about the County's strategic plan for the coming years, commissioners discussed goals including binational strategies for working with interests based in Mexico. Precinct 2 Commissioner David Stout brought up a concern that, with staff handling binational affairs falling under the office of the county judge, the decision was made for that staff not to attend a conference in Mexico City without more discussion.

"That's my issue," Stout said Thursday during the meeting. "So the unilateral decision was made by the county judge to not have somebody from bi-national affairs at that event because of the issue with the travel. I think instead of being worried about that, we need to push back and say we need to be at the table at these events because we're doing ourselves a disservice if we're not, right? I mean, they're really important conversations going on at events like these, whether it's NACO [National Association of Counties]. I mean, this is one of the only ones, one of the few times we actually have the opportunity to go to Mexico City and advocate on behalf of El Paso and on Mexico City, right?"

Stout said he had traveled to that meeting himself, but that by not having staff with the county office handling the issue in attendance it didn't advance the county's goals as much.

"I go for my own knowledge and my own benefit," Stout said. "And for my office's benefit because we've been involved in binational affairs, but when you have the person who's the staffer who's supposed to be in charge of binational affairs absent from those conversations, it's a disservice to the whole court and to our whole strategy." 

County Judge Ricardo Samaniego said he didn't know that Stout had gone to the conference, and that he had canceled his own trip to the conference due to concerns about travel policy.

"I think we've done a bad job of you traveling, coming back, and we don't know what happened," Samaniego said to Stout. "That there's no reporting, there's no information, you're not sharing. For example, right now you went to Mexico City, we didn't know about it. I think it would have been fair to say, 'I'm going to be there, is there anything that we…might you might want me to represent?' Secondly, coming back and saying, what did you gain?"

County Chief Administrator Betsy Keller said staff would look into how to structure such reporting requirements and would place it on an upcoming commissioners court agenda.