Did they actually "construct housing for themselves" though? They never owned said housing, I think at all times it remained the property of their employer, and I assume all their use of it only occurred while they remained employees. Now they are no longer employees, they no longer have access to that housing, whereas their employer is free to use it as they see fit.
If they'd used public funds to pay for the renovation of their own privately owned residence, that would be a very clearcut case of what you are talking about. I think this case is not clearcut.
If someone else was on duty at that site next week, then that person would be staying in the apartment.
I suspect that is what these were.
So the only real crime is violation of zoning laws.
This is not the case. They did this without anyone else's knowledge or approval. They were used only by the conspirators.
But now the employer knows about it, they should be able to make these facilities available to any of their employees or contractors who might be able to use them, in a way which could benefit the employer.
For example, if someone has to work overtime in an emergency, allowing them to stay the night in one of these apartments could allow them to save commuting time and be better rested for the next day, which could improve performance (and reduce safety risks due to tiredness). Or, if someone needs to be rostered on-call to respond to unexpected events, having them stay in one of these apartments may improve their response time if they are called in
They used employers funds without approval to build something that benefited themselves. Sure, it happened on employer property but without any type of approval. That is theft, let us not try to come up with complicated explanations to say its not theft.
This is an employee slacking off to build a side project that will be owned by to the company, but mostly has value for himself. Which wouldn't normally be a criminal matter, but the laws are (correctly) stricter about doing this kind of thing with public funds.
Caltrain is a government agency – it is incorporated by its three member counties under the California Joint Exercise of Powers Act, which enables two or more public agencies to agree to create a new jointly controlled agency, and delegate some of their powers to it. As such, do zoning laws actually apply to Caltrain? I don't know the answer to that question, but I wouldn't assume the answer is necessarily "Yes". Zoning laws are primarily targeted at private actors (private corporations and individuals) and government agencies are not always bound by them.
It is true that the work these Caltrain employees were doing was not authorised by upper management, but they were making improvements to Caltrain property and using Caltrain funds to do so, so most likely they still legally count as acts of Caltrain.
How is that worse than the management having too much space in their office than needed or leather covered office chair?
Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_conversion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_(law)
You do not need to steal money from your employer and deposit it into your savings account to embezzle.
Anything that is a misuse of company money is technically embezzlement.
If you use company money meant to upgrade your computer to build a fancy aquarium on your desk instead, that's technically embezzlement.
So would using company money to build a kitchen in your office - even if that's technically improving the company's property.
> If you use company money meant to upgrade your computer to build a fancy aquarium on your desk instead, that's technically embezzlement.
I knew this (now retired) public agency executive who couldn’t get enough money in her budget to keep the lights on, but the board was much more willing to fund new projects. Her solution? She’d get funding for all these new projects, use that to hire all these contractors, and quietly direct them to spend 50%+ of their time on “keeping the lights on” but bill 100% to the project. For example, funds appropriated for an identity management project paid for a network engineer who was supposed to configure the firewalls and load balancers for that project, but the project also paid for the weeks he spent upgrading outdated network switches in office buildings even though that had no logical connection with identity management. To my knowledge she never got in any trouble; on the contrary, I’m led to believe that “budget hacks” like hers are common in the public sector, and a lot of public agencies would just utterly collapse without them. Whereas, one of her underlings ended up in prison, because (apparently unbeknownst to her) he was awarding sham contracts to a company controlled by his friend. I think a big difference is the enterprise actually benefited from her redirection of funds, whereas it got absolutely zero out of his.
I think these employees do have a problem in they appropriated company property such that the direct immediate benefit was solely to themselves. If they’d appropriated it in a way which benefited other employees as opposed to just themselves personally, I think that would have made it much harder to prosecute. The same public agency, there was an internal dispute over whether it was appropriate to use public funds to pay for expensive (>$1000) coffee machines for staff break rooms - other divisions were doing it, she insisted hers couldn’t because it would be a misuse of those funds. But as far as I know the divisions which did do that never got in any legal or other trouble. The managers who requisitioned these expensive coffee machines shared the benefit of them with their teams. I think she was more afraid of the press and politicians than the law but the press and politicians never found out (or else maybe they did but just decided they had bigger fish to fry than coffee machines)
Maybe it is different in the US, but my experience is legislators generally don’t want to micromanage agency budgets - they’ll give the agency a bucket of money to spend but will leave it up to senior management to decide exactly how to spend it. Whether the agency spends $1 million on new LDAP servers or $1 million on new network switches is not the level of detail they want to drill down to, to them it is just “$10 million for X agency IT”. But for her, although she was responsible for proposing and delivering those projects, it was the level above her which had to approve carving them out of the overall budget, and that level was much more enthusiastic about paying for sexy stuff like identity management than boring stuff like replacing ancient network switches, even if the enterprise actually had a much more urgent need for the latter. So she just quietly redirected some of the sexy budget to help pay for those boring necessities
But it can be a much finer line.
Example: Approved effort for call center expansion to meet the growing demand of the public. Includes improvements to the backend business software to improve cycle time for the call center to meet goal of addressing public demand. Those backend software improvements - which were real, and did help the call center cycle time - just happened to be the same improvements requested by mobile field workers for 5+ years, which were never approved.
Did a leader see the opportunity to make the 5+ year requests happen and pull it into the budget ask? Absolutely. Were the changes necessary to accomplish the call center project with the resource / staffing levels in the budget proposal? Yep.
I view the prior example as the same. Sexy projects don't work unless the foundation is operational; allocating funds under Sexy project to shore up foundations is surprisingly common.
The real learning for me is the vicious circle. New upstairs leader sees everyone say don't need to spend on sustain, so doesn't spend on sustain, but nods to higher-than-actual costs for New Cool Thing, and the layers below upstairs work the game to get key sustain tied into New Cool Thing projects... which then supports upstairs view that don't need higher sustain costs. Tough to break this.
https://www.silive.com/news/2023/03/1-million-for-a-toilet-i...
Also I once had dinner with a Netscape dev back in '99 who told me about a guy who had just been fired after he was found to have moved into the office.
There are quite a few instances of this kind of thing.