These past couple of weeks have been a little bit like the days leading up to Christmas: There has been a lot of guessing going on about what’s in the package. (80 percent chance of a pea green tie, in my experience.) The package I’m talking about today is the audit on Rock Chalk Park infrastructure costs. It is due to be released on Thursday.

My best advice has been to be patient because we’ll find out soon enough (but, of course, if I was so smart I wouldn’t have an abundance of pea green ties but a paucity of lime sherbet slacks to complete the outfit.) Regardless, I understand the curiosity. There is a multitude of paths the auditing firm could have travelled down in this audit, but a limited amount of time for them to do so. It does create natural questions about what got examined and what was left largely unreviewed.

Here’s my best effort to spell out some of the issues that may be worthy of examination:

• The Value Question. One issue that seems highly likely to be included in the audit is whether the city was charged a reasonable amount for the work done at the project. In other words, is the approximately $12 million that was billed to the city roughly in the ballpark of what similar infrastructure projects are costing elsewhere? It is an important question to ask, but in a way, the city is really in a lose-lose situation on this one. If the audit finds it is not a reasonable number, lock up the mayoral china because there are lots of things that are going to get broken at City Hall. But if the audit finds it is a reasonable price, that is still not going to satisfy many members of the public because they aren’t interested in whether the city got a reasonable price. They’re interested in finding out whether the city got the best price. They want to know whether the city would have gotten a better price by simply following the city’s standard bidding practice. If you remember, much of the controversy surrounding this project is because the city allowed the $12 million worth of infrastructure work to be completed without going through the normal bidding process. That question became heightened when the city decided to bid the recreation center after the public objected to the proposed no-bid process for that building. The low bid came in at $10.5 million versus the $18 million that the city had projected. Yet, city officials stuck with the no bid process for the infrastructure because their partner in the project — KU Endowment — was convinced the bid process would add too much time to the process, and it felt it was important that a construction group led by Thomas Fritzel build the infrastructure to ensure that it met their quality standards.

• This pot of money and that pot of money. A natural question on this project has been whether funds meant to pay for infrastructure — roads, parking lots, utilities and such — were used to pay only for infrastructure costs, or whether some of those funds also were used in the construction of the stadiums that will be leased by KU Athletics. The city is responsible for reimbursing Fritzel’s Bliss Sports II for its costs associated with building the infrastructure. The city is not responsible for reimbursing Fritzel’s Bliss Sports for any of the costs to build the stadiums. In many cases, the same contractors working on the infrastructure project were the same contractors working on the stadium project. For both projects, they were sending their bills to groups led by Fritzel.

As public uproar on the project grew, the city requested more and more documents related to how contractors were getting paid. Those documents showed several checks were written by Bliss Sports to pay for work that was related to the infrastructure. It is unclear why the company that is responsible for building the stadiums would be paying for infrastructure costs. The more important question, however, is did Bliss Sports II — the company responsible for paying for the infrastructure costs — ever write any checks related to the stadium project? I asked KU Endowment officials last month whether they had ever taken the relatively simple step of looking at the check book register of Bliss Sports II to determine what checks had been written on that account. They told me they had not, and that they didn’t find such an exercise relevant.

What does seem to be relevant is the use of a construction loan that was to be used specifically for the construction of the infrastructure. The city is paying the interest cost on that loan, so it has a strong desire to ensure that the construction loan wasn’t used to help even out dips in cash flow on the stadium project. I have yet to see any documents that clearly show how the withdrawals from the construction loan match up to the payments made to infrastructure contractors. I’m not saying they don’t match up, but it isn’t clear that they do.

• Inaccurate documents. One of KU Endowment’s roles in the process has been to review the amount that Bliss Sports II is seeking reimbursement for on the infrastructure project. The main vetting process has relied on subcontractors of Bliss Sports II signing documents attesting to how much they have been paid by Bliss Sports II. But looking at those documents, it did not take long to realize that there were several technical inaccuracies in the documents.

Some of the documents were backdated, which isn’t a great practice. Several of the documents said the contractors were paid by Bliss Sports II, when in fact the cancelled checks showed they were paid by Bliss Sports or other parties. Some architects and engineers who worked on the project didn’t sign the documents at all. Are these just technical glitches, or are they a sign that KU Endowment’s vetting process was inadequate?

• All in the family. Some of the subcontractors on the infrastructure project are other firms that also are controlled by Fritzel. Those subcontractors signed documents attesting that they too had been paid certain amounts — more than $1.4 million. But when it came time to see the cancelled checks for those payments, they couldn’t be produced. KU Endowment officials later said that the companies, since they were related, didn’t actually make payments but rather made notations of receivables and payables on their books.

I have green ties, not green eye shades, so I don’t know all the ins and outs of accounting practices in such instances. But there seems to be a basic question of how much documentation the city should require from the Fritzel-related subcontractors. Think about it for a moment: Fritzel is the entity asking to be reimbursed by the city. Fritzel also is essentially the entity, in the case of this $1.4 million, who is attesting to how much the work cost. Would it be wise for the city to ask for some cancelled checks that the Fritzel subcontractor paid to its employees and suppliers to help verify that the costs are what they have been purported to be?

For example, documents submitted to the city show the Fritzel controlled entity DFC Company of Lawrence paid one employee $60 an hour to do staking work at the site. That one employee worked 863 hours, or more than 70 hours a week, during one period of time. Another was paid $40 an hour and work over 800 hours in the same time period. Are there cancelled payroll checks that verify that?

Some people have said it is inappropriate for me to raise such questions because it insinuates that Fritzel is being dishonest. I have found that argument irksome. I’m not insinuating Fritzel has done anything wrong. I’m asking a question about whether the city has done its job in verifying the costs. The public was promised a robust effort in verifying the cost of this project since it was not going through the city’s normal bidding process. Now is the time where the rubber meets the road on that promise.

Missing documents. And finally, there is the simple question of seeing some documents that the city has been unsuccessful in obtaining from Bliss Sports II. For example, it has been acknowledged that Alpha Omega Geotech did inspection work for both the city-funded infrastructure project and the privately funded stadium facilities. But the city has yet to ever see an actual invoice from Alpha Omega. The parties have acknowledged that such an invoice exists. This seems to be the type of invoice the city would want to particularly look at to ensure that the costs are being accurately allocated to the appropriate projects. Why has there been such reluctance to turn that invoice over to the city?

So, those questions may or may not get answered in the forthcoming audit. We won’t have to wait long now. Keep an eye on the LJWorld web site on Thursday for information following the audit’s release.