FAYETTEVILLE -- The Arkansas Division of Legislative Audit won't look into Washington County's spending on its bridges, officials said Friday, because the county doesn't have documentation with enough detail to do so.
The decision is the fourth time a state or regional official has denied a request from the county to look into subpar bridge construction. The attorney general, 4th Judicial District prosecutor and the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department reached similar decisions before Friday.
Meeting
Washington County Quorum Court
• When: 6 p.m. Thursday
• Where: Quorum Courtroom in the County Courthouse, 280 N. College Ave. in Fayetteville
• On the agenda: Not yet set, but discussion on county bridges and costs of their repairs is likely, and members of the public can give comments to officials before the meeting ends.
Source: Staff Report
Washington County has no pending requests left. Its own investigation into the Harvey Dowell and Stonewall Road bridges earlier this month remains the only in-depth review of how and why the spans were built without proper steel reinforcement against an engineer's designs.
State Sen. Uvalde Lindsey, D-Fayetteville, first suggested the county ask for an audit into the Road Department's spending, just in case some concrete or rebar was missing or some other inconsistency existed. He relayed the decision from the audit division to county officials Thursday.
The problem is the county department doesn't track its spending for each specific project, such as a bridge, which makes an audit of that project impossible, Lindsey said.
"It all goes into one pot, county road, and they get the bills and they pay them," he said. In other words, the county buys material and pays the bill, and that's the end of it. In a better system, Lindsey said, the county would buy materials, put them in inventory, then specifically note when the material gets taken from inventory and for which project.
He said he's disappointed the county doesn't have the documentation. Proving county-built projects are cheaper than private contractors would be is impossible without it, he said.
Those concerns don't mean money is missing or someone's committed fraud, Lindsey added.
"They keep good county records, they pass all of their audits," he said of the county, referring to annual government-wide audits by the audit division. "You just can't tell if a project was improperly done."
The audit division met with comptroller Cheryl Bolinger, county Chief of Staff Dan Short and assistant road superintendent Shawn Shrum in April, according to minutes of the meeting Lindsey provided to the county.
In the minutes, an audit division employee wrote Shrum tried to personally keep track of invoices for specific projects in order to have an estimated total cost at the end. The county doesn't budget for each project, instead working on them as money becomes available, the minutes show. The employee isn't identified, and a request for comment from the audit division Friday wasn't returned.
The employee noted Shrum could miss some invoices, making exact accounting unreliable. The amount of rebar used for a project isn't recorded, according to the minutes, and the county has no system to track changes made to a project's plans.
The Road Department made several changes to the Harvey Dowell and Stonewall plans, according to a report released May 5 by Assessor Russell Hill, Justice of the Peace Eva Madison and private engineer Carl Gales. After interviewing employees and reviewing the bridges, the investigators found multiple deviations at both sites, as well as cracks, erosion and other evidence the changes were shortening the bridges' useful lifespans.
"It did not appear that we could take their files and come up with an accurate amount of materials and funds that were expended on a project," the audit division employee wrote. "It would appear that the best we could hope to accomplish is an estimate, and that is similar to what they (the county officials) are already doing."
Evidence of problems at the two bridges first came to light in March, when County Judge Marilyn Edwards, who oversees the Road Department, placed a 3-ton weight limit on Harvey Dowell outside Fayetteville and ordered workers to tear down the unfinished Stonewall outside Prairie Grove and redo it under an engineering firm's supervision.
Harvey Dowell cost $415,000 to build and is expected to cost another $32,400 to reinforce and repair, not including the cost of paying county employees for the work, Short previously said. Stonewall is expected to about $435,000 by its completion, also not including labor, Edwards told the Quorum Court on Tuesday.
After the county report's release, Edwards said she had "soul-searching" to do. In a letter to the Quorum Court on Wednesday she said she was waiting on transcripts from the investigation's interviews before making changes at the Road Department. Madison said Friday the transcripts for all 16 interviews were being prepared by a private court reporter in Springdale, and they could be done by Monday.
"Those will play a large part in my determinations moving forward," Edwards wrote.
Several members of the department's bridge crew have retired or resigned in recent weeks, and work at Stonewall has halted because the remaining workers refuse to go back.
Edwards and Short didn't return repeated requests for comment during the past two weeks on why the crew is refusing, when and how work might resume and if the resigned workers are being replaced. Edwards published a request for qualification May 3 in the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette seeking a temporary bridge crew supervisor to work for eight months.
Lindsey, the state senator, said the auditors offered to give recommendations to the county to improve its accounting. That can only improve the county government as a whole, which has been his priority in the ordeal, Lindsey said.
"We wouldn't have known this without going through this exercise," he said. "I hope we are somewhere close at least to a conclusion of this particular phase (of investigation), and we'll see how the county improves going forward."
Bolinger, the comptroller, said advice is welcome. The comptroller tracks spending at all county departments and makes sure costs fit in the year's budgets.
"Any time the auditors have a recommendation, we definitely look at those," Bolinger said. "Typically they've seen other counties; they've seen something that will work or they feel will work."
Edwards and Short also didn't return messages Friday asking for comment on the audit division's decision. County attorney Steve Zega said the audit division's denial doesn't mean the end of the county's fixes at the Road Department.
"I think what we have now is a definition of the problem," Zega said. "It's another part of this that's going to help us better refine what we do."
NW News on 05/16/2015