Doyle’s Loose Travel Logs

Honestly, I'm more surprised those in the 2nd Floor Press Release Reproduction Center Madison Capitol Bureau actually did a story like this.

When I was with the Green Campaign in 2006, one story we tried to sell the state press (because be honest people, leaked opposition research is how most campaign news is done) was a story about the Doyle campaign's very loose details on travel expenses.

For example, we'd have this detailed explanations of everything the campaign would buy versus these heavily general ones from the Doyle campaign.  If we had paid X amount on a campaign credit card, we'd painstakingly itemize the bill.  The Doyle campaign, on the other hand, would just say it paid the campaign credit card bill.

End of story for them.  What they bought was a mystery, and still remains one.

Given how Doyle's hidden travel in the past (one rumor we were floated was a Doyle stay at the Mohican Sun Resort & Casino in Connecticut), the idea his team is hiding travel again from the taxpayers of Wisconsin again doesn't surprise me.  It's par for the course for the man and his arrogant team.

Gov. Jim Doyle and his staff failed to properly account for 145 travel expenses over two years, including a $5,200 business-class flight to Ireland and a $654-a-night stay in a London hotel.

Nearly three-fourths of the time in 2007 and 2008, Doyle and his staff didn't supply receipts as required under state travel policy. By comparison, Lt. Gov. Barbara Lawton and her staff didn't provide receipts one-third of the time during the same period.

Travel records also showed Doyle spent more than $1,500 on two chauffeured vehicles in Canada. That expenditure did not violate state travel policy, however.

State policy requires employees to provide receipts for purchases made with their state-issued credit cards for flights, hotels and other expenses. That documentation was often missing from hundreds of pages of Doyle's travel records obtained under the state's open records law.

For a state that likes to talk up its openness of government, the reality if Wisconsin has some of the most loophole-heavy disclosure laws in the nation.  Expenses don't have to go done to the line-item level, and there's no requirement to do so whatsoever.  You're completely dependent on a competent bureaucracy and press keeping a check on them.

As seen here, the press is doing its job, the bureaucracy, not so much.

Perhaps its time the Department of Administration in Madison - traditionally under the control of the sitting Governor - stop having oversight over the governor's expenses?