Yesterday, I told you a group of LANTA workers has emailed me. They assure me "there are many good people working for the Authority, hundreds of employees – bus drivers, bus mechanics, customer service agents, accountants, dispatchers, supervisors, and service technicians that work tirelessly day in and day out to ensure some quality of service for those who rely on LANTA every day. However, LANTA riders and employees, as well as taxpayers of Lehigh, Northampton and Carbon counties deserve new leadership at LANTA."They detail the following problems.
1) In LANTA’s fiscal year 2006-2007, LANTA’s maintenance department submitted an inventory $45,000 short of expected accounting figures. After a few weeks of recounting it was determined that there were in fact many missing parts, but perhaps not to the extent of $45,000. Fearful of board action, maintenance wrote the difference off and dropped the issue as being “close enough.”
2) At the end of each month for LANTA’s Metro Plus service, the agency collects trip counts and bills the appropriate agencies – including the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to be reimbursed for trips provided. LANTA has not submitted bills to any agency since July 31, 2007 (currently LANTA is three full months behind). Furthermore the bills that were sent to agencies in July (agencies were sent bills for the months of March, April, May and June all at the same time) were only estimates and not accurate. When the Governor Ed Rendell’s office threatened to not pay LANTA for trips provided if bills were not received by July 31, 2007 – LANTA simply estimated how much they were owed and billed accordingly.
3) LANTA’s Accounting Department has virtually no inventory of any computer equipment, furniture, or office equipment aside from vehicles and parts used to repair buses. The inventory is extremely outdated and very inaccurate, and many new purchases are not submitted to the department to be added to inventory. This has resulted in huge amounts of fraud and pilfering of material.
4) LANTA has suffered multiple major network failures, including data loss. The most severe occurred over the summer when LANTA’s database, including the social security numbers and other private and privileged information, was exposed to the public. To date LANTA has refused to publicly acknowledge this security breach, much less provide credit monitoring services for those affected.
5) Carbon County contracts LANTA to provide transportation services – both fixed route and door-to-door service within the county each year. With the new funding package approved by the General Assembly this past July, the majority of agencies received additional funding to improve their services based on past performance. Carbon County was the only transportation system to not receive any additional funds. With Carbon under LANTA management, LANTA failed to secure additional funding for Carbon County while every other transit agency did.
Imagine, corruption and poor accounting practices from a public agency. No way! Unfortunately agencies like this will run forever in this manner, despite the massive inefficiencies. The coffers of tax payer dollars are virtually endless and will continue to prop up the shortfalls. A reflection of the general scheme under which Allentown operates? Maybe.
ReplyDeleteThere's not much one can respond to about a detailed message from the inside. When that message comes from those involved and affected, one has to listen regardless of personal opinion.
ReplyDeleteAm I to assume that the anonymous commenters are still developing an attack?
Given this attitude, it is little wonder LANTA would be so unresponsive.
ReplyDeleteAnon 1pm,
ReplyDeleteCare to elaborate?
If Allentown council candidate Schweyer is on Lanta's board, what does that tell u about his oversight abilities? So is he a go-along, get-along? We don't need to give Pawlowski another yes man on council.
ReplyDelete