Mayor: Trips 'don't seem ... out of line'

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The records made public Wednesday shed new light on the depth of Houston officials' involvement in the foreign airport project and the amount of time and energy they have devoted to their international work.

The airport system's top two officials, Vacar and Bartlett, made at least 14 trips between Jan. 1, 2008 and mid-May 2009 to Ecuador and Costa Rica, according to Vacar's calendar. The Houston Airport System has ongoing, multimillion-dollar projects in both countries.

Vacar traveled to Quito, the Ecuadoran capital, five times and to San Jose, Costa Rica, once; Bartlett traveled to Costa Rica six times and to Quito twice. Sometimes the men stayed only a night or two, and other times stayed several days, records show.

Vacar also traveled to Libya in late February of this year, at an apparent cost to taxpayers of more than $13,000. The tab was OK'ed by Houston chief administrative officer Anthony W. Hall Jr. on March 13, records show. Click here to see a PDF of travel records pertaining to Vacar's Libya trip.

Asked Wednesday evening about the mayor's knowledge of Vacar's work overseas and his travel on behalf of such projects, White spokesman Patrick Trahan sent an e-mailed response:

"The Mayor was aware of the contracts in place for Ecuador and Costa Rica. The Mayor was not aware of the details of any specific trip. Authority to approve travel ... related to this contract was delegated to Chief Administrative Officer Anthony Hall who did monitor the travel.

"The Airport Director's industry is about travel and transportation from one port to another. The job of sustaining and growing commerce requires travel."

The number of trips taken to Quito and San Jose, Trahan said, "amount to about one trip per (annual) quarter over (the) 18 month period and don't seem, at first glance, out of line for the type of contract."

Most of the administrative paperwork for Vacar's Libya trip states the reason for his travel as the generic desire to improve airport business with that nation, such as "explore opportunities for airport operations ... in Libya."

Indeed, the Houston airports' relationship with Libya has nowhere to go but up. Even Bush Intercontinental, Houston's largest airport and one of the busiest in North America, has no direct flights to Libya's capital city. Indeed, most Americans probably know little of the north African nation except for memories of President Ronald Reagan's stare-downs with Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi in the 1980s and the passing reference to "the shores of Tripoli" in the first verse of the Marines' Hymn.

But a closer inspection of Vacar's calendar for the dates leading up to his Tripoli trip show that key players in HASDC and its affiliated concerns met multiple times regarding Libya.

A meeting on Jan. 27, marked "Discuss Libya," was held at the Houston offices of AECOM, a company that has done business with HASDC. The attendees, the calendar said, included Vacar, HASDC chief Jeff Scheferman, and the head of AECOM.

Another meeting, on Feb. 10, took up most of Vacar's afternoon. Noted as the "Libyan Group," the calendar entry noted that the group met at HASDC's offices on the North Sam Houston Parkway; the attendees included Vacar, another airport system official, and a third man whose name appears elsewhere in Vacar's calendar in connection with the Costa Rican project, Peter Danczkay.

While in Libya, Vacar had dinner at the AECOM Villa and at the Marcus Aurelius Arch and dined at the Al Waddan Hotel with U.S. Ambassador Gene Cretz. He toured the Roman ruins at Leptis Magnus and flew to the town of Benghazi and met with "several Benina Airport officials."

While the paperwork for Vacar's other trips on HASDC business bear a notation that the tab was being picked up by HASDC, the Libya trip bore no such note. In fact, an expense spreadsheet in the airport files shows the city paid more than $10,000 for airfare alone on Vacar's Libyan jaunt, along with $3,000 in other expenses. (He flew Continental, Amsterdam to Tripoli, then flew home through Rome and Newark.)

Vacar also traveled to Toronto, where he met last August with Canadian investors on the Ecuador project; and to New York City, where he and HASDC officials met with officials of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and with the investment banking firm Goldman Sachs, which was interested in possible financing of the Houston takeover of Chicago's Midway Airport and the new airport in Denton County, Texas.

Continued on page 3: 'Next steps': Nicaragua?

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