Does Sacramento police chief flying first class violate city policy? She says no
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Sacramento police chief expensed $18K in travel, often flying first class.
- Lester reimbursed portions using inflated coach fare estimates as baselines.
- Travel persisted amid city budget crisis despite formal restrictions in 2024.
Sacramento Police Chief Kathy Lester routinely flew first class or business class to attend 10 conferences during a one-year period ending in December 2024, passing on part of that higher ticket cost to taxpayers, even though the city’s travel policy specifies employees should travel the most economical way possible.
Lester said she did not violate that policy because she reimbursed the city the difference between the coach and first-class tickets. But a Sacramento Bee review of her expenses shows a system in which she used high estimates for the coach fare, leaving taxpayers footing part of the bills for higher-priced travel.
Her expenses, which The Bee obtained through a public records request, also show the city’s top cop stayed in four-star hotels costing as much as $855 per night and often, for ground transport, used Uber Black, which provides luxury sedans and are at least twice as expensive as lower-cost options.
In one instance, Lester reimbursed the city $825 for a December first-class ticket, which she initially charged on a city credit card. The city said it had discovered the error Feb. 13 and she repaid it March 11, after The Bee filed its public record request.
Lester, in an interview in a conference room at the Embassy Suites hotel in Old Sacramento, defended her travel and said that she had done nothing wrong or unethical.
“The city pays for, essentially, the main ticket, and then any employee can pay for an upgrade or a different seat using their own personal funds, which is exactly what I did,” Lester said.
She added, “It’s really just a personal choice.”
Lester has been police chief for three and a half years and was paid $346,180 in gross earnings in 2024, according to the city, a $34,000 increase from the previous year, making her one of the highest compensated chiefs in California.
Police spokesperson Sgt. Dan Wiseman said that Lester is working nearly all the time when she travels, and flying first class helps her be efficient.
The city’s current travel policy, which was created in 2007, states that violations of the policy could lead to the suspension of travel privileges or other disciplinary actions. Lester and the City Manager’s Office said the chief did not violate the city’s policy of traveling by “the most economical means of transport” because she paid for the first-class portion of the travel.
Mario Lara, the assistant city manager who approved the expenses, defended the conference travel. In an emailed statement, Lara said the conferences were a “valuable opportunity for an executive-level staff member to stay current on best practices in the field.”
Lester’s city-funded travel expenses totaled $18,489 in 2024. Federal money likely also contributed to Lester’s first-class travel. The city was reimbursed about $9,000 by several federally funded nonprofits that organize police conferences.
The records show that Lester and the Police Department passed on much and, in multiple cases, all of the expense of first-class travel.
For example Lester, for two May 2024 conferences, purchased a first-class ticket from Sacramento to Vancouver and from Vancouver to Orlando for $1271.91. She was reimbursed $1296.64 for the same travel.
The approach she used for the Vancouver travel and in other instances, according to emails and expense reports, was to show a high-cost “main cabin” fare, which in some cases ended up exceeding the cost of first-class travel, and use that as the base cost. This fare was not purchased — it was used as a comparison with the cost of first class to determine how much Lester needed to reimburse the city.
In another instance, records show Lester was reimbursed by the city for a $1,306 ticket in early December between Sacramento and Minneapolis, a ticket she never actually purchased. The price exceeded the cost of the first-class ticket she had initially purchased.
Travel experts said that airfare for that route at that time of year typically costs between $220 and $450.
Asked if she had submitted screenshots of reservations that were never purchased to create a basis for reimbursing Lester, Lester’s executive assistant Tammy Hall said, “yes.”
Even though the city and Lester said this action does not violate city policy, the notion of flying first class resonates differently, for example, with Debrah Cummings, a longtime community activist in Del Paso Heights.
“First class. Oh my lord, we need better than this,” she said. “Our communities are burning up, our kids are getting shot.”
What the records show
The Bee examined hundreds of pages of dense, sometimes hard-to-follow expense reports. Among The Bee’s findings from these records:
▪ From December 2023 to December 2024 Lester was at, or traveling to, conferences in cities nationwide and in Canada — including Orlando, Florida; Nashville, Tennessee; Boston and Vancouver, British Columbia — for a total of 37 days.
▪ In one case, Lester expensed $1,306 for a round-trip ticket to Minneapolis in December 2024 and charged an additional $825 on her city-issued MasterCard. Days after The Bee filed a public records request in March for Lester’s expenses, Lester wrote a check to reimburse the city for $825. Even with that reimbursement to the city, the airfare covered by taxpayers was roughly three times the typical coach seat.
▪ After she charged the $825 for the Minneapolis-to-Sacramento return trip on Dec. 6 on her city credit card, her executive assistant justified the charge by stating that the chief needed to push up her return one day to attend a City Council budget and audit committee meeting. However, the changed flight was not scheduled to land until after the meeting began. She did not attend the meeting.
▪ Lester charged city taxpayers $855 for a one-night hotel stay in Boston in October so she could attend a board meeting for a nonprofit organization. She did not obtain specific authorization prior to incurring the expense, as is required by city policy.
▪ The police chief charged taxpayers $395 to stay in a luxury airport hotel in Orlando in May 2024 after her assistant told the city in an email, “her flight was canceled.” But Delta, the airline she flew, told The Bee the flight was not canceled. When presented with that information, a police spokesperson said the cancellation was by Lester: “She canceled the flight.”
▪ Lester charged taxpayers $2,243 for three first-class flights in May 2024 related to conferences in Orlando and Vancouver, according to expense reports for the two conferences. Lester and the city stated that the city only paid for coach fare, despite the reimbursement for costs nearly identical to what the first-class tickets cost.
City’s financial woes and travel suspension
John Pelissero, director of government ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, when presented with the details of Lester’s expenses, said her travel was “highly questionable.”
“Public officials have a fiduciary responsibility to the taxpayers to make good use of the city’s tax dollars, and not be spending them on things like first-class travel,” he said.
The majority of travel occurred after then-City Manager Howard Chan sent a citywide email restricting travel in January 2024. As Sacramento grappled with a then-projected $50 million budget gap, Chan told staff, “We are taking immediate steps to reduce our costs by extending the hiring freeze and suspending travel.”
City spokesperson Jennifer Singer said the travel suspension was never really a travel ban, explaining that travel has been “still permitted on a case-by-case basis, if it is approved by the department director and the assistant city manager.”
“It doesn’t look good, and it particularly does not look appropriate in an environment in which the city has had travel restrictions in place and a $50 million deficit,” Pelissero said.
In the interview, Lester said the conference travel had provided vital tools for issues that she cares about and aided the city in obtaining federal grants and assistance.
”Travel actually has to get approved by our assistant city manager and the City Manager’s Office,” she said. “And travel has been allowed, in many cases, for critical job functions, for certifications, and so certainly, when there’s a value to doing it. “
Anatomy of a ticket
Lester attended a three-day conference in Minneapolis in December 2024, hosted by the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Public Safety Partnership. The records show Lester changed a $1,141 first-class round-trip ticket she had purchased more than a month earlier, charged to her own credit card, so that she could return a day earlier to Sacramento. That price increased by $825 to $1,966.
Rather than provide a receipt for the $1,141 ticket, according to the public records, Lester’s executive assistant instead provided a screenshot of a ticket that would have cost $1,306 had it been purchased.
Lester then charged the additional $825 to amend her original first-class ticket to her city-issued credit card.
Hall wrote Police Administrative Manager Brenda Delgadillo to explain the change. “The Chief now has to be back on Tuesday for Budget and Audit with City Council, so she has changed her flight,” Hall wrote.
She noted that she added “new main cabin pricing,” a reference to the screenshot of the $1,306 coach ticket.
Travel expert Katy Nastro said many variables can raise the cost of such a last-minute coach ticket.
“The price could have been extremely expensive for an economy ticket,” she said. “If it was considered refundable. ... Often, the most expensive economy fare will be one with full refundability. Often, business people will book these due to plans changing last minute.”
In a phone interview to explain this process, Hall described Lester’s attendance at the audit committee meeting as “mandatory,” and said it had only recently been scheduled.
The city’s travel policy states: “If cancellation occurs due to a city-related change or circumstances beyond the traveler’s control, the department will pay for the penalty cost. However, if the cancellation occurs due to a traveler’s personal request, the traveler will be required to pay the penalty.”
The meeting was scheduled to begin at 11 a.m. Lester’s new scheduled arrival time, one changed to attend the meeting, was 11:09 a.m. An archived video shows the session was over by 11:25, about the time Lester could have been exiting Sacramento International Airport’s Terminal A under the best of circumstances.
“She wouldn’t have known it was going to be short,” Wiseman explained in a text. “Her intention was to be there for it and had a flight arrival scheduled at 11:09 a.m.”
The city reimbursed Lester for the $1,306 ticket, the estimated fare that had not been purchased, and for four months absorbed the extra $825 change, making the ticket reimbursement more than what was actually spent.
Four days after The Bee filed a public records request for Lester’s expenses on March 7, Lester wrote a check for $825 to the city to reimburse the charge she had made on the city’s credit card.
Wiseman said an “error” was “later identified during reconciliation, and the overpaid amount of $825.51 was reimbursed to the city via personal check. That check was deposited on March 11.”
An $855 hotel stay
Not all of the police chief’s travel, which cost city taxpayers thousands of dollars and took the chief out of state for more than a month, was approved as required ahead of time by Lara — who supervises the Police Department.
Lester attended the Major Cities Chiefs Association meeting Oct. 15-18 in Boston. That travel was approved. Lester added two days of travel expenses without prior authorization, according to records provided to The Bee.
The original authorization that Lara signed stated that travel would be Oct. 15-19. However, records show Lester stayed in Boston an additional two nights to participate in a meeting with a board of the Police Executive Research Forum, on which she serves. Its website describes the group as “an independent research organization that focuses on critical issues in policing.”
The organization reported $12.5 million in revenue in its most recently available nonprofit tax returns, including grants from federal agencies. PERF’S Executive Director Chuck Wexler said in an email to The Bee, “As a rule we do not cover our board of directors travel costs for our board meetings.”
The city did not provide records to show that this specific travel had been approved. Wiseman, in an email Friday, said it had. “The information we shared confirms the travel in question was authorized,” he wrote.
Singer said via text, “this was an approved trip.”
The forum’s board meeting was held at 8:30 a.m. Oct. 19. Lester was invited to two receptions, one on the evening of the 19th and the other on the 20th, according to an emailed invitation.
The two additional hotel nights in Boston cost $1,269, charged to city taxpayers.
Lester submitted a hotel bill for $855 for her final night in Boston on Oct. 20 and $413 for hotel on Oct. 19, which was approved by Lara on Nov. 7 for reimbursement, after Lester returned from the trip.
“That rate reflected the going rate at the time,” Wiseman said of the $855 bill. He added that the price may have been driven up by a number of conferences in Boston at the time, and “there was a hotel workers’ strike during that period involving thousands of employees, which may have further impacted pricing.”
Lester’s Uber costs in Boston were twice to three times as much as typical Uber rides because of her preference to book Uber Black, which offers luxury cars. Records show that, during a two-day stretch, Lester spent $336 on luxury Ubers, including a $70 charge for a 2.6-mile trip in downtown Boston.
Two weeks on the road
Lester’s longest conference travel stint involved two consecutive weeks on the road, which took the city’s police chief from Sacramento to Vancouver to Orlando in May 2024. For much of the trip, Lester was accompanied by a companion, whose name was redacted in the records.
She attended the Major Cities Chiefs Association meeting — the organization has two conferences annually. And she flew to Orlando to attend another Police Executive Research Forum meeting.
“The Major Cities Chiefs Association (MCCA) meeting took place in Vancouver, followed by the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) annual meeting in Orlando, where the Chief serves on the Board,” Wiseman said in an email. “Rather than returning to Sacramento in between the two conferences, which would have resulted in additional airfare, the Chief traveled directly from Vancouver to Orlando. This was the most efficient and cost-effective option. While in Orlando, due to the break of time in between conferences, the Chief took three personal days, which were covered entirely at her own expense.”
With the legs of the Vancouver and Orlando travel, the number of canceled flights, flight reservations that were not purchased but used to determine the “main cabin” fare, and some missing travel documents, following Lester’s travel costs is difficult.
One document submitted for reimbursement shows a screenshot of a never-purchased reservation for Sacramento to Vancouver and Vancouver to Sacramento for $1,042.95. Written on the document is “main cabin price” with an additional notation that says “+253.70” with a total written of “$1,296.64.”
That reimbursement total exceeded the $1,271.92 that travel documents show she paid for the flight segments referenced.
Despite the first-class price tag, Wiseman said Lester had abided by the travel policy because she paid for her own upgrades.
Another cost to taxpayers was Lester’s decision to stay an extra night at a luxury airport hotel for $395. An email from Delgadillo stated: “I’m confused on the 5/31 hotel charge. The flight I see says she came home on the 31st, Did she come home on 6/1?”
Hall responded: “You are correct, her flight was cancelled and rescheduled but still for 05.31.24. Then that flight was cancelled and she stayed at the Hyatt Orlando Airport and flew out the 1st.”
The Bee asked Delta about Lester’s original flight being canceled. Morgan Durrant, a Delta Airlines spokesperson, said that it had not canceled the flight.
“The flight operated normally,” Durrant said.
Wiseman then clarified what happened. Lester did the canceling.
“She canceled the first flight, in order to try and get back to Sacramento earlier,” he said.
This story was originally published June 10, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
CORRECTION: Because of the information provided to The Bee, this story stated an incorrect amount for Lester’s travel expenses for 2024. The story has been changed to correct that. The story was also updated to include when an incorrect reimbursement charged to Lester’s card was found.
