To bypass traffic in her massive political district, Los Angeles County Supervisor Kathryn Barger travels aboard firefighting helicopters with operating costs as high as $9,500 an hour, records show.

The practice of using helicopters to traverse the district began with her predecessor and former boss, Michael Antonovich.

A short trip to Palmdale in January to induct the newest board members of the Antelope Valley-East Kern Water Agency may have cost up to $17,000, according to an analysis of flight logs and billing rates. Barger was back in a helicopter and on her way home less than an hour after the meeting began.

The Southern California News Group estimated flights taken by Barger and other supervisors over the past five years cost at least $195,000, based on flight times and hourly billing rates, but it was impossible to confirm that figure because of spotty record-keeping.

County officials say they don’t track how much they spend on supervisors’ flights at all and could not provide official cost breakdowns for the trips.

No ‘quantifiable’ extra cost

Barger’s office also argues the flights overlap with routine deployments and do not cost taxpayers extra. However, the county could not provide any records to verify that claim, despite searching for more than a month.

“There is no quantifiable additional cost,” said Tony Bell, a spokesman for Barger.

In an interview, Assistant Fire Chief Derek Alkonis, of the Air and Wildland Division, said deployments typically occur in the mornings. Return flights and evening trips would not usually fall within that window, he said. There may have been other reasons for flights later in the day, but he said he could only speculate.

“If you’re going to do an admin flight, then you would try to do two or three things at a time, if you can,” he said.

And even when those overlaps occurred, the helicopters would need to divert to pick up or drop off the supervisor, usually in downtown Los Angeles or Glendale, neither of which is used for deployments.

“That’s where your costs would be additional,” Alkonis said.

At the request of Barger’s office, Alkonis sent a follow-up email the next month, stating that while there is a cost associated with every flight, there are “no additional itemized costs identified for the supervisor’s transportation on these occasional flights.”

Reached by phone a second time, the assistant fire chief said he wanted to include another staff member in the interview and would call a reporter back. He has not returned subsequent requests for comment in the past week.

Hitching a ride

The department moves aircraft throughout its jurisdiction for “readiness and deployment purposes,” Alkonis said. The division is based out out of Barton Heliport in Pacoima and stages helicopters in Malibu, Lancaster and Pomona to assist in emergencies, according to report given to the Board of Supervisors in 2016.

Occasionally, routine flights are coordinated with Barger’s office to give her transportation to official events, particularly in the Antelope Valley, Alkonis stated.

However, picking up Barger and returning her home can more than triple flight times, according to an analysis of the flights.

Take, for example, the January flight to Palmdale for the swearing-in. If the helicopter needed to deploy to Lancaster, it would have flown only 26 miles from its starting point at Camp 9 in the Angeles National Forest.

But the helicopter crew had to pick up Barger at Men’s Central Jail in Downtown Los Angeles, fly her to Lancaster, wait for her meeting to end and then drop her off at Verdugo Hospital in Glendale. Once the supervisor left, the helicopter returned to Lancaster, records showed.

The additional stops added 101 miles to the trip and nearly an hour of extra flight time.

It’s worth noting the the same round trip by car would have likely taken more than three hours based on traffic that day.

The 5th District is gigantic

Los Angeles County’s 5th supervisorial district covers more than 2,800 square miles and is larger than the other four districts combined. It stretches from Alhambra to the Ventura, Kern and San Bernardino county lines. The Angeles National Forest divides the district, separating the cities in San Gabriel Valley from those in the Antelope Valley on the county’s northern edges.

“It’s a huge district, but it’s not ungovernable with the right leader,” said Bell, Barger’s spokesman. “She’s really made an effort to be in her communities to show them that she cares. She wants to make sure she is there whenever possible.”

The flights are scheduled in advance with the intention that every flight should piggyback off other trips the fire department would make regardless, Bell said.

With only the 14 Freeway connecting to the Antelope Valley, Barger saves “countless hours of traffic congestion time” by traveling via helicopter, he said. Her coverage area expanded to include Whittier and El Monte once she joined the Sanitation Districts of Los Angeles County in 2018.

Barger also has been joined by federal transportation and aviation officials to observe choke points on freeways, which he said resulted in $40 million in funding for her district.

The supervisor has taken 17 flights since taking office in 2017 but only one so far in 2019. The flight times in the last three years totaled about 20 hours, a sharp decline from Antonovich’s usage in the three prior years. Bell said she has not flown in the past eight months because there was no need.

“It’s certainly not overused,” he said.

How much it could cost

Responding to a public records request, the County Counsel’s Office provided a list of each supervisor’s helicopter trips in the past five years, as well as hourly billing rates for helicopters used by the department.

A fire department official handling a public records request stated the billing rates provided were the only responsive records showing the “costs associated with operating and maintaining the helicopters.” During the July interview, Alkonis similarly said the billing rates cover the actual costs of operation, though they are primarily used when requesting reimbursements from other jurisdictions.

The Sikorsky Firehawk, a firefighting version of Lockheed Martin’s Black Hawk, costs $9,500 per hour to operate, while the Huey-manufactured Bell Model 412 costs $2,321 per hour, according to billing rates. Helicopter components have lifespans measured by the hours of utilization.

The billing rates factor in fuel usage, maintenance and insurance, according to the fire department. Those rates do not include the salaries for the pilots and crew members assisting with the flights. A senior pilot can make more than $100 an hour when receiving overtime.

Based on the billing rates, it likely cost the county at least $195,000 for supervisor flights since 2014. The fire department does not bill or invoice other county agencies and instead includes the administrative flights in its budget.

How costs were calculated

The $195,000 figure likely under-represents the total costs because the county’s flight records were inconsistent and often incomplete. When records were missing, the Southern California News Group’s analysis assumed lower costs and shorter flight times when calculating the total.

Some flights completely lacked supporting documents, while the logs for others left out crucial information. The majority of Barger’s flights did not list the type of helicopter used, though all of the records for Antonovich did. In those instances, the hourly rate for a Bell 412 — the helicopter with the lowest billing rate — was used instead.

When supporting documents were provided, the records frequently conflicted with the flight times provided by the county in a separate list. The fire department listed two 20-minute flights on Jan. 8 when Barger traveled north to induct the new board members. However, the flight logs filled out by the crew listed a total time of an hour and 45 minutes.

The 40-minute trip would cost $6,334, while the longer trip would cost $16,628, according to the billing rates.

The county would not answer questions about the discrepancies in the records.

Why flight times matter

The county’s annual cost for aircraft operations is determined by the hours flown, according to an analysis done by Conklin & de Decker Associates in 2016. The analysis, which lumped administrative flights in with training, stated the department averages about 288 hours total per year for each helicopter.

Barger averaged about seven hours a year of flight time, based on the county’s list.

Of more than 40 flights, only one involved a supervisor other than Barger or Antonovich, who left office at the end of 2016. Nearly all of the trips taken were to the Antelope Valley. None appeared to be for anything other than official business.

Need for more helicopters

Many of the flights occurred during a period when county fire officials claimed they did not have enough active helicopters.

In July 2017, Fire Chief Daryl Osby asked the Board of Supervisors to approve the financing of two Sikorsky S70i helicopters at a cost of up to $29.4 million. Osby cited the 2016 review by Conklin & de Decker Associates, which stated the department needed the new helicopters because it had a fleet availability of just 55 percent during periods with a high risk of wildland fires. The department was down one helicopter because of an accident in 2015.

The new helicopters, which had to be modified from a military configuration, are expected to arrive within the next year. In July, Barger, a champion of the program, announced the county would purchase two more, eventually bringing the fire department’s fleet of Firehawks to seven total, according to the Santa Clarita Valley Signal.

Department officials and Barger’s office stressed firefighting always takes priority over administrative flights. Flights would be cut short, or diverted, if a helicopter was needed for an emergency, they said. There was no indication from the records that such a flight had to be diverted in the last five years.

The original request to analyze the fire department’s helicopter needs was made by Antonovich in his final months in office.