The call included Jim Martinie and Kathy Young with UA Payables, Cindy Klein-Banai, Stephanie Lage, and Morgan Johnston.  Ben McCall, Shelby Egan, and Ginger Valezquez were unable to join the call.

This discussion was started through a group in Chicago looking at the travel policy with Amtrak.  Unlike with airfare it wasn’t giving a preference for Amtrak.  Also, even a higher class than the coach class Amtrak is much less expensive than driving, and people may be more productive on the train.  Are there options and promotional opportunities.  Payables was going to look at it and provide us with an update. 

Policy is set by the Illinois Higher Education Travel Board and it is very difficult to get them to change.  Ginger is the representative for the UI with the Illinois Higher Education Travel Board.  They prescribe the lodging limitations, per diem amount, and travel policies.  Can do procedures and not policies on our side, but they haven’t had much luck with change requests for increasing per diem or lodging limitations.  Cindy said that this would be a little different because we want to ask them to reimburse less than for car travel.

Probably need to focus on what can be done here and what we do have control over.  Providing some information to Amtrak and train travel under make travel arrangements.  We can update the pages on the OBFS page. Payables was really focused on making procedural changes with the web-page – Kathy would like to work with someone to put the information on the website.  Kathy will submit the information for the changes – Cindy will work with them to help with that, with Stephanie.  Stephanie will bring Gary Miller up to speed about the policy issue, for the Green Governing Coordinating Council.  Morgan will get a contact at IDOT in support of Amtrak travel.

They were able to come up with a preliminary report that identifies the instances that someone has driven and been reimbursed for mileage between Urbana and Chicago.  That report needs a little fine tuning – by departments.  We can count and sum the info by department with the details.  They will look at instances between Chicago and Springfield, as well.