kbray@heraldnet.com

ARLINGTON — The city is waiting on results of a state audit that has been delayed several times while officials look into multiple concerns about city operations.

An audit of Arlington’s finances was released in September and found no problems with the city’s financial statements.

But the city’s accountability audit — a separate report that looks beyond the numbers to explore how the city is managed — is pending.

“The conclusion of that audit has been delayed until we can resolve a number of issues with the city,” said Thomas Shapley, a spokesman with the state auditor’s office.

Details about those issues won’t be publicly available until after a formal exit interview with city officials, he said. In general, accountability audits examine the rules and laws a city is subject to, and whether city staff and leadership have adhered to those regulations.

“They look at operations,” Shapley said. “They look at whether or not local governments follow state and federal laws and their own local policies.”

The auditor hopes to release the report later this month.

“Accountability is things that we can do better,” assistant city administrator Kristin Banfield said. “And I’m one to say there are always things we can do better.”

The city is waiting to schedule an exit interview until it receives notice the audit is complete, she said. The interview can be a private meeting between a couple city leaders and state officials or a public meeting with the city council and other interested parties.

“We let all of our council members know when that meeting is,” Banfield said. “If more than four of them (a quorum) want to attend, we’ll publish that as a public meeting.”

She expects the majority of the council may want to attend, and the meeting would be open to the public but separate from regularly scheduled city council meetings.

Banfield wasn’t sure when to expect a meeting notice. The state auditor’s office has delayed the report multiple times.

“We’ve had two or three false starts where they thought they were done but needed more time,” Banfield said. “We do take the audits very seriously and we try to implement recommendations as quickly as possible.”

City officials have some hints about what auditors have been exploring.

Having a municipal airport, for example, adds a layer of complexity to city management and the auditing process, Banfield said.

Most Snohomish County communities don’t have a public airport. Because Arlington does, the Federal Aviation Administration requires the city to uphold certain safety, maintenance and management obligations, called grant assurances, in order to receive federal airport funding and to qualify for financial assistance programs.

If the audit finds any problems at the airport, staff and airport commissioners will work to remedy them, airport director David Ryan said.

In the meantime, they’’re working to plug some holes in leases and to update the airport’s leasing policy. In November, they updated a lease for the Arlington Fly-In storage space, an agreement that had expired eight years ago. The commission plans to host a workshop in January to review a new leasing policy for all airport properties, Ryan said.

The proposed policy puts existing practice into writing, he said. That includes meeting with prospective tenants, making sure site plans satisfy city and airport codes, and having the city attorney review each lease before the airport commission votes on it, according to the proposal.

Updating the policy and any outdated leases would be a priority with or without an audit, said Ryan, who became airport director in August.

“It’s just a matter of having a step-by-step process for what needs to happen to lease different properties at the airport … so that all leases are uniform,” he said. “Part of what I’ve been doing is going through the leases and trying to make sure they’re up to date.”

If the auditor has other recommendations to improve airport management, those can be implemented, as well, he said. But the city and airport won’t know what needs to be worked on until the audit is finished.

One local business owner suspects the problems are related to airport management. Kevin Duncan of Arlington Flight Services Inc. said he submitted complaints about the airport to the state auditor’s office this fall.

The auditor received a complaint through the office’s citizen hotline on Oct. 3, Shapley said, but he could not release or confirm the name of the complainant.

Duncan has confronted the city council and the Arlington Airport Commission in the past, according to meeting minutes. He forwarded his concerns to the auditor’s office because they “seemed to fall on deaf ears” at the city level, he said.

He’s worried, specifically, about the handling of airport properties with ties to Arlington Mayor Barbara Tolbert and Bruce Angell, planning commission chairman and Tolbert’s personal partner.

Tolbert and Angell are volunteers with the annual Arlington Fly-In and have been since before Tolbert was elected to the city’s top office. Tolbert is the executive director of the nonprofit Fly-In, which is run by a board of directors. The Fly-In is the city’s largest event of the year, and one of the largest fly-ins in the country.

In November, the airport commission moved to establish a new lease for the Fly-In storage site. The lease had expired in 2006, though Fly-In volunteers continued to use the space for storage. The new lease, for $947.62 a year for the 9,025-square-foot site, is essentially an update of the expired lease, Ryan said. The site does not have utilities or road access and is used to store supplies for the annual Fly-In.

“They paid every year but didn’t write a new lease,” Ryan said. “I can’t answer why it happened, but I do know they paid.”