Baltimore’s spending board retroactively approved several travel requests for city State’s Attorney Ivan Bates Wednesday, trips Bates submitted after The Baltimore Banner revealed that half of his travel since taking office had not been properly reviewed.

The trips, one to Fort Lauderdale in 2025 and two to Chicago in 2023 and 2024, were approved by 4-0 votes of the spending board, with an abstention from Comptroller Bill Henry. All were part of the board’s routine agenda and were not discussed.

Bates has been submitting past trips, some almost two years old, after The Banner reported at least eight trips had not received proper scrutiny by the city’s spending board. The trips approved Wednesday were highlighted in the reporting as was a trip to Boston in 2024 that the spending board approved last month.

Baltimore’s elected officials are required to submit requests for travel to the Board of Estimates for consideration if the city will cover costs in excess of $800. Trips paid for by outside parties must be submitted if they exceed $100. Board rules call for travel to be submitted in advance of a trip, although the regulation is routinely broken.

Rules for city travel were tightened as a result of Bates’s predecessor, Marilyn Mosby, who spent 140 days away from Baltimore in 2018 and 2019. The travel, detailed in a report by Inspector General Isabel Mercedes Cumming, took Mosby to Kenya, Scotland and Portugal.

Bates was critical of Mosby’s travel, but failed to disclose several trips of his own. Travel to New York City, San Juan, Puerto Rico and Boise, Idaho were not approved. Nor were the newly approved trips to Chicago, Boston and Fort Lauderdale.

All of the travel was work-related. Bates attended meetings of the National Black Prosecutors Association, the National District Attorneys Association, the Maryland State’s Attorneys Association and a National Prosecution Best Practices conference.

On Wednesday, the spending board approved a $725 expense for the 2024 Chicago trip and $837 for the trip to Fort Lauderdale. Both were furnished by Prosecutorial Performance Indicators, a partnership of Florida International University and Loyola University Chicago that uses data to measure prosecutorial effectiveness. Bates previously disclosed the group also paid for a trip to Miami in 2024, which has yet to be approved by the board.

James Bentley, a spokesman for Bates previously told The Banner that the Florida trip cost $1,156 and the Chicago trip was a $2,192 expense. Bentley said this week that the initial totals were miscalculated, in part because the state’s attorney paid for the cost of his own meals. Bentley declined to comment further.

The spending board also OK’d a $2,239 expense paid by the city for Bates’s 2023 trip to Chicago.