Metra’s ongoing need for oversight

Damage control has become something of a tired theme around the administrative halls at Metra since the death of former Executive Director Phil Pagano in 2010. The lack of oversight involving Pagano is well-documented, with new evidence surfacing every few weeks of the naive relationship the Metra board maintained with its top administrative officer.

Presumably, the board has learned the error of its ways and is working to address procedural flaws that allowed Pagano to siphon nearly half a million dollars away from the system. It still is trying to determine everything Pagano got away with, and putting in place new systems to prevent a similar problem in the future. The compromise described today by Daily Herald Transportation and Projects Writer Marni Pyke, calling for the removal of Pagano-era board members within a year, is an effort to regain control, even if it is a bit more reflexive than thoughtful.

But none of this precludes Metra from embracing new opportunities to assert its control when they arise. Case in point: a $450,000 contract Pyke described on Monday with the public relations firm Culloton Strategies. It may be that Metra needs assistance with occasional communications projects that are more complicated or labor-intensive than its four-person staff can manage. But more than $400,000 worth? And that, perhaps even more alarming, imposed by a contract on which the board never voted?

“Discounted” or otherwise, to echo the term Culloton Strategies founder Dennis Culloton used to describe the contract, that amount hardly seems like a supplemental figure to support the agency’s standard public relations expenses — which, curiously, Metra also could not immediately estimate.

Add to this a lease granted to Culloton Strategies for 10th-floor office space in Metra’s downtown Chicago headquarters at the attractive rate of just more than $2,000 a month, plus taxes, and you begin to get an idea of how far the Metra board of directors still has to go to re-establish authority over its spending.

Board members say they’re preparing to seek bids on a new communications contract, and they insist they’ll vote on this one. Great. Let’s hope they scrutinize it carefully before they do.

At least one director, Jim LeBelle, goes into the process with the wholly appropriate assumption that “$400,000 is a lot of money and it needs to be less.” As Metra prepares to plunge even more deeply into talk of service cuts and fare hikes, that is the expense-skeptical language members should be using.

Redundant though calls for greater oversight may sound at Metra, the PR contract shows why they remain important. More than a year after Pagano’s misdeeds came to light, questionable expenses are still surfacing, and Metra still can’t provide information as straightforward as a simple budget item for public relations expenses. It doesn’t take a high-priced PR consultant to make clear that the public won’t stand for this.