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SALT LAKE CITY -- Critics are questioning UTA over sending some employees to a conference in Florida this winter near the same time the organization was getting ready to announce cuts to bus and train routes to save money.
The cost to send five employees to the annual transit conference in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in February was just over $8,000.
Chairman of the University of Utah Department of Political Science Mathew Burbank tells the Deseret News questions are raised if you're cutting back everywhere but still traveling to Florida.
UTA spokesperson Gerry Carpenter defends the training, telling KSL Newsradio it has cut its training budget by 50 percent but feels it's important to keep employees up to date.
"Our training budget is less than one percent of our total operating budget," says Carpenter. "We feel it's really critical to maintain that even in difficult economic times. Some of these ideas we've brought back from national conferences have literally saved Utah taxpayers millions of dollars. The amount of investment we make for training is really very minimal for the return it brings to Utah."
But why travel to Florida?
"You can't get transit training in Utah so we have to go where that training is provided," Carpenter says.
E-mail: rjeppesen@ksl.com
