Tucson to give auditors Rio Nuevo data

Once those documents are identified, Gottschalk told the City Council, the district's auditors will re-evaluate their findings.

"We are going to come up with an action plan," Gottschalk said at Tuesday's council meeting. "Once (the auditors) get all the information, (they) are going to redo this audit report. And they are going to provide a report based on the updated information that they have. And after that time, we will have something to respond to."

Rio Nuevo board member Fletcher McCusker confirmed the meeting with the city but stopped short of saying the audit will be rewritten.

"Not redo, but finalize," McCusker said. "Audits like that usually occur in the field because that's where the data is best accessed. ... So we've asked the city to cooperate with our auditors and allow them access on site to review anything we want to review. And they've agreed to do that."

McCusker said it's a step in the right direction in repairing the damaged relationship between the city and district, but the city must provide documents to explain the significant expenditures on the west-side projects.

"A big portion of that was considered undocumented and that's just not acceptable," he said. "We've got to get that (information) and the city has to cooperate with us."

Providing the auditors with documents they sought previously may have been impeded by the fact the Rio Nuevo board, under the leadership of now-deposed chairwoman Jodi Bain, prohibited the auditors from communicating with the city, Gottschalk said.

David Barber, with the auditing firm of Reiger, Carr & Monroe, said the firm acted according to the direction of the district's board and legal council.

McCusker said the restrictions may have been necessary because of litigation the district filed against the city.

"I think it was a different environment because they were in mediation," he said. "But the city has to cooperate with these auditors because I can't see any other way to get it resolved."

Gottschalk said the city handed over "the largest conglomeration of documents we had in one location that didn't require thousands of hours of staff time to generate," and gave a clear warning to the auditors the documents were incomplete, and that if any specific document was missing, the city would provide it on request.

"They never let us know about any specific items," she said. What they did send, she continued, was a vague letter asking if the city had anything else it would like to share.

She said over the more than 10-year life of Rio Nuevo the city tried multiple accounting systems and has records on microfilm and microfiche, with cross references, and that it would have been an inefficient use of taxpayer money to go through everything minutely.

"If we had a specific list of what we need, it's simple to pull it up. … But they did not do that," she said.

But Councilman Steve Kozachik said public-records requests shouldn't be tantamount to a game of 20 questions that forces people to guess what documents the city may or may not have.

"We shouldn't have said we had given them everything if we knew … that documentation existed and hadn't been turned over," Kozachik said during the meeting. "If you're asking for us to do a data dump on you, then do the data dump on them and let them figure it out."

He added when a records request is overly broad, it should be incumbent upon the city to pick up the phone and clarify what a person may be requesting.

"To the extent that call never happened is how we got to this point," Kozachik said. "This isn't an audit of your personal checking account. This is $200 million. People have lost their jobs over it. People have been voted out of office over it. So you pick the phone up and say I got your request and let me make sure I know what you're really asking for."

Contact reporter Darren DaRonco at ddaronco@azstarnet.com or 573-4243.