DOJ Investigation of SANDAG ‘Is Long Overdue’ Says UT Editorial Board

By The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board / April 4, 2024

The recent report that the San Diego Association of Governments is being investigated by the U.S. Justice Department said agency officials weren’t exactly sure what prompted the federal probe. That is in its own way a testament to the fact that SANDAG — the main regional transportation planning agency with a huge $1.3 billion annual budget — has been so awful on several fronts that any might trigger an inquiry.

The latest scandal certainly qualifies. Evidence shows SANDAG wrongly charged up to 45,000 drivers for a toll road they did not use, and an internal inquiry found agency officials knew of the bogus charges for more than a year without telling the agency’s Board of Directors. If a private business knowingly and persistently kept charging people for services they didn’t use, the indictments would be swift and public condemnation would be overwhelming.

But this grotesque mismanagement was no surprise to San Diegans, given the histories of recently resigned Executive Director Hasan Ikhrata and his predecessor, Gary Gallegos.

A 2020 internal audit detailed how Ikhrata had approved hundreds of thousands of dollars in improper severance and bonus payments without following basic rules meant to safeguard public funds. Ikhrata’s indifference to his ethical obligations as a senior government official was again on display in 2022 when another internal audit was made public that showed SANDAG employees ran up more than $300,000 in improper and questionable bills on taxpayer-funded purchase cards without push-back from the agency’s top executives. A U-T Watchdog report last year also noted that SANDAG routinely broke federal rules with poor record-keeping on multimillion-dollar contracts.

That Ikhrata encouraged these scandals by openly treating them as if they were no big deal — he called findings in one critical audit a “perception” problem, not a real one — makes the toll-road fiasco all the more understandable. That he was also a huge disappointment on the policy front needs to be remembered as well. As the centerpiece of a $160 billion long-term regional transportation plan, Ikhrata proposed a 200-mile network of elevated or tunneled high-speed rail. He had no substantive response when asked how SANDAG could avoid the headaches that have doomed the state’s bullet-train project — starting with the political impossibility of building rail lines in affluent communities.

Gallegos, who resigned in 2017, also presided over an agency that couldn’t be trusted. The worst example came with SANDAG-sponsored Measure A, a proposed 2016 county sales tax that was later found to have been sold with flagrantly, fragrantly deceptive estimates of how much funding it would generate and how many projects it could fund. Gallegos claimed that he was unaware of the deceit, but at least one credible report shows he sought to cover it up.

If this history suggests San Diego City Hall may have a rival when it comes to local government mismanagement, it shouldn’t. Under a 2017 state law approved in the wake of the Measure A scandal, SANDAG was forced to change to weighted voting rules that base influence over its board on population. This means San Diego has by far the most sway over the agency. But the city has not used its clout in any way since then to change SANDAG’s wretched internal culture.

This is why in December, The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board urged San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria to force change on the agency. Unless SANDAG can rebuild trust, it’s hard to imagine it winning public support for the series of tax hikes it wants to pay for transportation improvements — including the proposed half-cent sales tax hike on county ballots in November.

A good starting point would be for SANDAG’s board to systematically remove all the officials who let the toll road scandal proceed without fixing it and who thought lying to voters in 2016 was acceptable. If this depopulates the executive suites at the agency’s B Street headquarters, so be it. The case for a massive housecleaning at SANDAG is overwhelming.