After running up a tab of nearly $15,000 on his city-issued credit card for meals and travel expenses last year, Roanoke Councilman Alfred Dowe has been asked to curb his spending.
Mayor Nelson Harris said Wednesday he recently asked Dowe “to refrain from making any more expenditures,” given his cumulative total.
Dowe’s spending accounted for almost half of the total for all seven council members, which was $34,570.67 last year, according to statements of economic interest filed with the city clerk’s office.
Put another way, Dowe spent more on meals and travel than did all of his counterparts on the Roanoke County Board of Supervisors and the Salem City Council combined.
At the taxpayers’ expense, Dowe spent $14,604.03 last year on meals, travel and lodging — charges that ranged from a weeklong conference in New Orleans to lunches and breakfasts at area restaurants.
Dowe defended the expenses, saying every conference he attended and every meal he ate was related to city business.
“There are a couple of ways to govern,” he said. “You can govern by sitting back and only responding to the people who you think would be strategically beneficial for your politics.
“Or you can respond to as many people as you positively can.”
Dowe said he only became aware that his expenses were so much higher than the rest of the council two weeks ago, after The Roanoke Times made a request under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act for the credit card statements and receipts of all seven council members.
However, City Clerk Stephanie Moon said she alerted Dowe to his spending pattern on a number of occasions last year.
Moon said she also passed the information along to Harris, once in May and again in December.
“Because it was outside the norm, I was just flagging it, so to speak, to say, ‘This is what you are spending compared to the other council members,’ ” Moon said.
Dowe spent well more than Harris, whose charges amounted to $5,892.36 last year. The rest of the council members’ expenses fell within the $2,000 to $5,400 range, with one exception: Brian Wishneff spent just $123.60 last year on the city’s tab.
Moon said that while her office sometimes has questions about the expense reports filed by council members, she was not aware of any indications that Dowe was misusing a MasterCard the city issued in his name after he took office in 2002.
Dowe’s spending in 2007 marked a dramatic increase from the year before.
That’s because he attended more out-of-town conferences in 2007, Dowe said. He went to Washington, D.C., in March to attend a conference of the National League of Cities; traveled to Chattanooga, Tenn., in October for a Regional Leadership Trip; and went to New Orleans in November for another National League of Cities conference.
The combined total for those three trips was $5,701.68, according to his statement of economic interest.
Dowe said he decided to become a more active representative of the city after campaigning for re-election in 2006, when he said many people told him: “We need to see you more as a leader.”
“It was really kind of a concerted effort to become more involved, especially at the state and national levels,” Dowe said of his trips.
Roanoke has been issuing credit cards to city council members since 2001, according to Ann Shawver, the city’s deputy director of finance. At first, each council member was given a budget of about $3,500, Moon said.
But several years ago, the individual accounts were merged into one general line item.
Of Dowe’s total expenses for 2007, more than $2,000 was for meals. Some of those meals he ate alone while attending conferences, but at least 60 were at area restaurants with an invited guest.
Dowe used his credit card to foot the bill for meals with city employees, council colleagues, business leaders, architects, engineers, lawyers, bankers, school board members and members of nonprofit agencies.
They ranged from $6 breakfasts at The Roanoker or Famous Anthony’s to more lavish meals at places such as 419 West and Table 50.
In many other cases, Dowe said, he ended up eating the cost himself.
“The benchmark for me was that if it got to the point where it was a really expensive place, I paid for it myself,” he said.
Brian Mason, of Atlantic Bay Mortgage, said he ate out a number of times with Dowe last year — even though only one meal, a $4.90 breakfast at the Daily Grind, showed up on the councilman’s expense reports.
Mason said Dowe is always willing to talk to anyone about any issue he thinks might benefit the city.
“He bleeds Roanoke, I think, so that’s a pretty good thing to have,” Mason said. “He’s always thinking about what’s best for the city.”
But Michael Ridenhour, a Roanoke audiologist, had a different take on his lunch with Dowe in July at Wildflour, which came to $23.
“We mainly talked about his golf game. He hadn’t been playing as much as he wanted to,” Ridenhour said.
Dowe did ask his opinion about a proposed amphitheater project, Ridenhour recalled. But he said much of the conversation consisted of Dowe, who is an agent for Northwestern Mutual Financial Network, asking Ridenhour if he could be his agent.
“I had high hopes that this was just going to be a friend-to-friend meeting. But as it turned out, he was trying to sell me something.
“I love Alfred; he’s a great guy … but I thought it was a Northwest Mutual lunch,” Ridenhour said.
Dowe said he remembered the amphitheater being a bigger part of the lunch conversation. But he also acknowledged that it’s not unusual for his full-time profession to come up during a meal over city business.
The spending by members of the council for meals and travel is relatively small when compared with the city’s overall budget of more than $250 million.
But to some critics, that’s not the point.
“I think there’s a right thing to spend money on and a wrong thing to spend money on,” Wishneff said. “So it’s not the overall amount.”
Wishneff called Dowe’s spending “a terrible abuse. I don’t think there’s any precedent for it, and I think it really looks bad.”
“It seems to me that if he had decided to take that challenge on — to go to lunch with everybody in Roanoke — he should have at least run it by council,” Wishneff said.
Vice Mayor David Trinkle said he didn’t know enough about Dowe’s expenses to offer an opinion.
But, he said, “I know Alfred well, and I believe him to be a real ethical person, and he is very involved … and a good representative of the city.”
Harris, who responded to a question about Dowe’s spending by e-mail Wednesday and could not be reached for additional comment, wrote that he asked Dowe to refrain from making any more expenditures about a month ago, after receiving a report from Moon.
“It is my understanding that when asked by the city clerk’s office about expenses, Alfred always indicated they were related to his work on City Council,” Harris wrote.
“I have not discussed in detail any specific expense items with Alfred, other than to ask him to curb his spending given the cumulative total of it.”
Dowe said his memory of the conversation was that the mayor asked him to keep an eye on his spending, not to stop it altogether. But just the same, he said, he’s starting to cut back.
“I’ve got to be very careful about the perception of other people, whether it’s accurate or not,” he said.
But before his conversation with the mayor, Dowe had already filed paperwork with the city seeking advance funding for a National League of Cities conference coming up in March in Washington, D.C. The projected cost for meals, lodging and registration: $1,575.