Vacar: City Hall signed off on $10,000 biz-class airfare

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Vacar said Wednesday that all of his travel on behalf of the nonprofit was paid for by the nonprofit. Indeed, Texas Watchdog did see several records this week during its public document review that indicated HASDC and its affiliated companies picked up the tab for several trips taken outside the U.S. by airport system employees on behalf of the nonprofit.

Vacar's Libya trip is among the issues that will be reviewed by the mayor's office as it undertakes a review of HASDC and its operations, said Patrick Trahan, a spokesman for White.

Vacar retired in May after meeting with the mayor; neither man will say what they discussed or why the mayor may have wanted Vacar out, though Vacar said Wednesday that the mayor had not accused him of any misconduct or wrongdoing, and that he had no reason to have hard feelings toward White.

The Libya trip came about, Vacar told Texas Watchdog, because the Libyan government had been in contact with a prominent business in Houston and extended the invitation to Vacar and a port official, among other Houstonians.

As for the cost of the trip -- the city paid more than $10,000 on airfare alone for the airport chief -- Vacar said it was a business class ticket.

Asked why he didn't get a cheaper coach class ticket, he said he was allowed as a department head under city travel guidelines to fly business class, and pointed out that an official in Mayor Bill White's office had approved the ticket purchase, and its estimated price, beforehand; city records show that the city's Chief Administrative Officer, Anthony Hall, signed off on an estimated cost of $13,907 for the whole of Vacar's trip the day before Vacar left for Tripoli.

Vacar also said that the city is able to charge 80 percent of ticket price for his airfare back to the airlines; 80 percent of Vacar's Continental ticket would be more than $8,000.

Records reviewed by Texas Watchdog showed Vacar and one of his top lieutenants made more than dozen overseas trips in the last 18 months of Vacar's tenure on behalf of HASDC, and spent considerable time in Houston dealing with HASDC matters.

Asked whether the nonprofit work, running airports in places like Ecuador and Costa Rica, distracted him from his work for the Houston airports, Vacar said, "That's a patently silly phrase," adding that his work for HASDC brought in money for the city.

He said no one should doubt that Houston's own airports were his foremost concern.

"I have a responsibility to HAS, to the city, to make sure that the activities of HASDC do not interfere with HAS," Vacar said. "And that's the balance I always had to strike -- and it's not a hard balance, actually. If it didn't look like or feel like it was in the interests of the city, it just didn't happen. Period."

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