GSA cancels Las Vegas conference

WASHINGTON -- The GSA scandal has claimed its first victim in Las Vegas.

A one-day trade show meant to connect government officials with clean-energy vendors at a modest off-Strip hotel was canceled this week by the General Services Administration in the fallout over the extravagant 2010 conference that was held 10 miles away at the M Resort in Henderson.

The cancellation left executives at the Hampton Inn Tropicana lamenting on Wednesday.

The GreenUP 2012 Training Conference and Vendor Showcase at the hotel on Dean Martin Drive, near Interstate 15 and Tropicana Avenue, was budgeted by the federal agency at less than $3,000 for perhaps 100 people.

The hotel will collect a cancellation fee the GSA must pay for calling off the show less than 30 days from its April 25 date, but it still will lose money on refunds to exhibitors who bought booth spaces.

Hotel sales and marketing director Mitchell Hirschman said he loses the opportunity to showcase the space to the 18 or so companies that were planning displays and that might have supplied return business.

Also lost, he said, is a chance to demonstrate his venue as a role model for gatherings done right.

"First of all, it was going to be an excellent event, let's start out on the positive," Hirschman said. "It was being done correctly."

He added: "The beauty of the conference is that it was not exorbitant. They wanted specifically to show that a meeting could be run with as little effort as possible, and effort meant money and it meant the amount of people that you need, and so forth. It had no frills."

Hirschman said he was surprised to get the cancellation call Tuesday. It was explained that the GSA was doing an internal investigation, and as with any investigation, future events were being stopped.

"I thought they should have kept it, if you want to know the truth," he said. "It was a meeting being done the right way, and they should have left this one. It kills me, but that's the way life is."

GSA spokesman Adam Elkington confirmed that the Las Vegas show was canceled as part of a review that acting administrator Daniel Tangherlini ordered after stepping in to clean up following the agency's Western Regions Conference. The agency's inspector general's office detailed thousands of dollars of waste and other questionable spending in the four-day October 2010 conference, which cost $823,000 to plan and execute.

Recordings from the conference showed GSA employees performing in skits and music videos, some of which lampooned the agency and joked about spending taxpayer money. In some clips, workers and supervisors banter about drinking and partying.

The GSA is compiling a list of conferences that are being called off as part of the agency's scrubbing of its calendar.

Among the meetings already canceled was a series of four small-business conferences scheduled over the next year, including a two-day session in September at the M Resort.

Small-business conferences in Honolulu, Phoenix and Oakland, Calif., also were axed.

Tangherlini was appointed acting administrator April 3, a day after the inspector general's report was released and administrator Martha Johnson resigned. Tangherlini told employees on his first day that he was reviewing all planned GSA conferences that involved travel "or substantial expenditures of public funds."

On Wednesday, Tangherlini continued a cleanup mission. He and Brian Miller, the GSA's inspector general, sent a memo to more than 12,000 agency employees, urging them to speak up if they see inappropriate activities by reporting it to supervisors or calling anonymously to the agency's hotline.

"One of the more troubling aspects of this incident is that people did not report this improper conduct or take action to stop it," the officials wrote in reference to the Las Vegas conference.

Contact Stephens Washington Bureau Chief Steve Tetreault at stetreault@stephensmedia.com or 202-783-1760. Follow him on Twitter @STetreaultDC.