SOUTH BEND - Pete Buttigieg made national news in November 2011 when, at age 29, he was elected the nation’s youngest mayor of a city with at least 100,000 residents.
Six years later, his national profile continues to grow, having surged earlier this year when he ran for chair of the Democratic National Committee. He didn’t win but his campaign impressed national party figures, who praised him as a rising star.
As his reputation has grown, so has his travel. In the last two years, his number of trips and days out of town have more than doubled compared to his earliest years in office, according to copies of his daily calendar reviewed by The Tribune.
From 2016 through September of this year, Buttigieg had taken at least 74 trips spanning 136 days. In his first two years in office, 2012 and 2013, he took less than half as many trips, 30, spanning 52 days.
Put another way, Buttigieg was out of town at least 19 percent of the days in 2016-17, with three months still left to go this year. That already is nearly triple the 7 percent of days he was gone in 2012-13, and he has more trips planned before the year ends.
The figures do not capture all of the mayor’s travels. Buttigieg said the records released to The Tribune were supposed to document only trips involving official business as mayor, not those for personal and political stops, under his legal team’s interpretation of Indiana’s open records law.
For example, trips to Phoenix, Detroit and Atlanta for DNC chair campaign events should have been redacted from his calendar, he said. But they were inadvertently left visible to The Tribune. The mayor keeps his personal and political calendar separately on his phone, he said, but his staff sometimes notes those trips on his official calendar to monitor his whereabouts.