It may simply be too late for Lawrence city commissioners to ease public concerns about the financial dealings associated with Rock Chalk Park.

Commissioners now are releasing figures comparing infrastructure costs at Rock Chalk Park to similar construction at Lawrence VenturePark to try to show that the costs the city paid under the no-bid Rock Chalk contract were reasonable. On Tuesday, commissioners also took the first step toward ordering an audit of public funds spent on the sports complex. An audit may still be a good idea but it would have been far better if it had occurred before the city paid almost all of the $12 million bill for the infrastructure, not now, when the only leverage the city has is the $1.06 million bill it has yet to pay for legal fees, interest costs and other “soft costs” of the project.

The fact is that there is no way for the city to determine with any accuracy that it wouldn’t have saved money by insisting on a competitive bidding process for the infrastructure. Instead, it gave into the KU Endowment Association, which was insisting that the infrastructure be built by Bliss Sports II, the private development group led by Thomas Fritzel, on a no-bid contract. Whether a competitive bidding process would have reduced the cost of the project is, as Commissioner Bob Schumm admitted, simply “unknowable.”

Schumm supported an audit, saying, “I hope it goes a long way to easing the public’s concerns.” That’s unlikely. No amount of analysis after the fact or comparisons with other similar projects will ease the public’s concern about the way this project was handled. The audit will either provide evidence that city taxpayers got their money’s worth or that they paid too much. Then what will the city officials do? Do they plan to take Bliss Sports to court?

How much time and money are commissioners willing to spend to prove their point on Rock Chalk? They already are looking at hiring an outside auditor with no connection to the city or to Kansas University to conduct the audit on the project. Even if the audit says the city got a good deal, many taxpayers still will be upset with the process commissioners followed. And that assumes that the auditor will have access to most or all of the detailed documents, which KU Endowment may or may not obtain and share with the city.

About the only way commissioners could really ease public concerns about this project would be to jump in a time machine, take competitive bids on the Rock Chalk infrastructure and come up with a low bid that is at or above what the city paid on its no-bid contract.

The city and local taxpayers may learn something from an audit that will prevent the city from repeating the mistakes that were made on Rock Chalk, but there probably isn’t much commissioners can do to make the people who are upset about this project feel any better.