UPDATE, 9:39 a.m. — City Manager now says he will withhold controversial Rock Chalk Park payment. $1 million check will be an item for discussion at the City Commission’s Dec. 16 meeting.

Lawrence city commissioners on Tuesday unexpectedly paid more than $1 million in disputed bills on the Rock Chalk Park project and did not provide any notice on its agenda that it was making the controversial payment.

Commissioners as part of their consent agenda agreed to make the final infrastructure payment to RCP, LLC. The $1.09 million payment consisted of legal fees, interest costs and other “soft costs” that a development group led by Lawrence businessman Thomas Fritzel was seeking to be reimbursed for as part of the Rock Chalk project.

At a Nov. 18 meeting, commissioners questioned whether some of those fees were appropriate and directed staff to prepare a report on the fees before they were to be paid. City Manager David Corliss did prepare a memo on the costs, and the report found that Fritzel’s firm was seeking about $157,000 in fees that the city found inappropriate.

Members of the public, though, likely had no idea of the findings. That’s because Corliss took the unusual step of sending the report directly to commissioners rather than making the report a part of the commission’s agenda packet. Normal city practice is that reports on items that require a vote of the commission are included in the agenda packet, which is widely available to the public and closely watched by the media.

Instead, Corliss placed the latest infrastructure report on a single section of the city’s website. Corliss said his office did not make any effort to notify the public or the press that the report had been completed.

After the meeting, Mayor Mike Amyx took responsibility for the issue.

“I obviously messed up and didn’t get it on there,” said Amyx, who has been a critic of the Rock Chalk Park process.

Amyx said, in hindsight, he understood that by not making the report easily available to the public that some members of the public may have lost an opportunity to comment on the infrastructure costs, which have been the subject of significant public debate.

Corliss said it wasn’t clear to him that the report about the disputed infrastructure costs needed to be a part of the commission’s agenda packet.

“Our response is that the people who are paying the bill had the information,” Corliss said.

The subject has brought up a longstanding issue with how the city pays its bills each week. As part of its consent agenda, the city simply lists an item that says: “Approve all claims.” But the agenda packet does not include any information about those claims. Instead, the city posts information about the individual claims to its agenda after the meeting has been completed. Corliss said that is because claims are being processed for approval right up until the day of the meeting.

As for the information that Corliss found when reviewing the infrastructure costs, he recommended that interest costs requested by Bliss should be reduced by about $107,000, and legal costs should be reduced by about $50,000. Corliss said there were reasons to question whether those expenses were incurred prior to the point that city officials had agreed to start making reimbursements for such items.