Bad enough that Oak Park Township government was caught back in 2012 defrauding the Pace bus system by systematically overstating the number of seniors getting subsidized rides. But for almost the exact same scam to be perpetrated by the same governmental body against the same vendor five years later is stunning and depressing.
As Journal reported last week, the punishment for its history of deception is Pace pulling the plug on continued subsidies of the program and reclaiming three small buses and a van used in the senior transit program. The lost reimbursements from Pace added up to $120,000 annually. The cost of partially replacing the rolling stock — and the township only needed to make a partial replacement because half of its reported rides were bogus — was still a cool $100,000.
There is blame aplenty here. Both the township board and administration should have been hypervigilant in monitoring ridership in the senior program after 2012. They weren’t. A range of staff members from the program supervisor to a number of drivers were purposefully, blatantly logging in riders who did not exist, or at least no longer existed. The Pace investigation found two regularly counted passengers who had died, respectively, in 2011 and 2014. This was no innocent math error.
Ultimately, one of those drivers tipped off Pace to the fraud last February. It didn’t take long for the unsophisticated deception to be revealed. The Pace report notes that drivers felt direct pressure from their supervisor to fake the numbers day after day. Without that whistleblower it is hard to know when this mess would have been uncovered. Seems unlikely township leadership was going to stumble over it.
Finally, did Oak Park Township ever have any plan to tell the public about its costly malfeasance? Does not appear to be the case. The Journal received its own tip about this story and, rest assured, it did not come from township government.