Concrete infrastructure is shown outside Sports Pavilion Lawrence at Rock Chalk Park.

After a weekend of sorting through more than a thousand concrete delivery tickets, Lawrence City Hall officials have now determined that a portion of the audit for the Rock Chalk Park sports complex was based on inaccurate documents.

The city analysis of the delivery tickets also found that the amount of acceptable concrete that was used at the site was about 10 percent less than what design plans originally called for at the project.

But city leaders also said they remain confident that the quality of the roads, sidewalks, parking lots and other pieces of infrastructure at the complex is good, and that the city has been billed an appropriate price for the work that was completed.

“We believe the community and the university will continue to see benefits from these improvements for years to come,” said City Manager David Corliss.

At their meeting Tuesday evening, city commissioners were briefed on the latest findings by city staff. Commissioners must still deal with an approximately $1 million worth of infrastructure payments that are still due to the Kansas University Endowment Association and ultimately Bliss Sports II, the private development company that did the no-bid work at the site. Commissioners agreed to discuss approving the final $1 million payment at their March 24 meeting.

Commissioners acknowledged an error was made in the documents delivered to the auditor and also said they did not fully understand how the auditor reviewed those documents, but commissioners did not express concern that the entire audit was compromised because of the discrepancy.

“But we do need to let it be known that we screwed up,” City Commissioner Jeremy Farmer said about the documents delivered to the auditor. “I’m deeply sorry to the public for that.”

Among the major findings of city staff:

• The city hired auditor — Tennessee-based McDonald & Associates — was given a large number of concrete delivery tickets that had nothing to do with the city infrastructure project. The auditor was given delivery tickets for more than 4,000 cubic yards of concrete that was used for the city’s recreation center or other non-infrastructure related work, and the auditor used a portion of those tickets to evaluate the infrastructure costs for the project. The recreation center project is a separate project from the infrastructure project, although in the same complex, and city officials said no costs between the two projects should be co-mingled.

• Delivery tickets totaling about 11,000 cubic yards of concrete for the infrastructure project also were mistakenly not provided to the auditor, meaning he was not able to examine those tickets as part of his review.

• City officials said they are confident the mix-up in delivery tickets, sometimes called batch tickets, has not impacted what the city owes on the project. The delivery tickets were not used in the process of creating a bill for the project. Instead, city inspectors were on the job site and measured the amount of concrete that was installed, and did periodic core samples to test its depth. Those tests and measurements were used to determine how much concrete was installed and thus how much the city should pay. The batch tickets, however, were meant to be a secondary means of verifying that the amount of concrete delivered on the site either matched or exceeded the amount of concrete city inspectors found to be installed.

Corliss, however, acknowledged the batch tickets were not used in that manner. City officials only began to look at the tickets in detail last week after questions about the audit were raised.

“We have treated these batch tickets like we have for every other project, but we don’t think that process is going to be acceptable moving forward,” Corliss said.

The batch tickets were part of what the city-hired audit firm examined when it gave the Rock Chalk Park project a glowing report and determined that the community had gotten a good value for the project.

Corliss said city engineers, however, spent much of the weekend and part of Monday reviewing all the batch tickets. After removing the batch tickets related to the recreation center, it was determined that 15,689 cubic yards of concrete was installed in the infrastructure project. That is about 10 percent less than the 17,471 cubic yards of concrete called for in plans.

City engineers said there were a couple of main reasons for that difference. In a few limited instances, the type of concrete poured did not meet city specifications, and city engineers refused to count that concrete as being properly installed. The largest area was a fire access road near one of the stadiums.

A second reason is that in some instances concrete was poured to a depth that was less than what was called for in design plans. As an example, the section of George Williams Way was poured to just more than 9 inches when the design called for 10 inches.

City officials said they believe the slightly lesser depths will not have a significant impact on the quality or lifespan of the infrastructure.

“We believe the community and the university will continue to see the benefits of these improvements for years to come,” Corliss said.

Corliss also said any time city inspectors found work either did not meet the city’s specifications or was poured to a depth less than called for in the design, it deducted a proportional dollar amount from that particular line item in the project’s costs.

But the process illuminates how the city’s unique development agreement with KU Endowment and Bliss Sports II works. Although about 10 percent less concrete was used than called for in plans, the city did not end up paying any less for the project. The city — if it approves the final $1 million payment as recommended by the audit — will have paid the maximum $22.5 million that was contemplated when the development agreement was signed.

That’s because even though the city reduced the dollar amounts in particular line items for concrete costs, those reductions did nothing to reduce the city’s maximum cap. That’s different than a normal city contract where the city accepts bids and then has a contract with a builder to construct a project for that fixed price. In those instances, if a builder were to use less concrete than a design called for, the city would see its total costs of the project decrease by a proportional amount. But the development agreement with KU Endowment Association and Bliss Sports II was not structured like a true fixed-price contract, Corliss said.

“This was a hybrid agreement that in my opinion should not be repeated, and if I have anything to say about it, it won’t,” Corliss said.

In addition to paying for hard construction costs, the city also was responsible for paying for a variety of soft costs, such as legal fees and interest costs incurred by the private development company.

Those costs ended up being significant. Emprise Bank, for example, ended up being the third largest vendor in the entire Rock Chalk Park project. The bank was paid $713,064 in interest and loan fees, according to numbers in the audit.

Corliss on Tuesday provided new information about those numbers. He acknowledged that the city could have financed the entire project through its bonding authority for an interest rate that would have greatly reduced the interest costs. Corliss said the city made an offer to KU Endowment and Bliss Sports II to finance the project through the city’s bonding authority and save money on interest costs.

“That was rejected by the partners,” Corliss said.