Council Never OKd $130,000 in Expenses : City Hall: Nine times in two years the final monthly expense sheet submitted by City Manager Dolly Vollaire did not match the one members passed. At least $13,000 in reimbursements to her were not seen.

During the past two years, Bradbury City Manager Dolly Vollaire added at least $130,000 worth of expenses that the City Council never approved to her monthly tally of expenditures, according to documents obtained by The Times.

Her final tallies were signed by her and either Mayor Audrey Hon or Councilman and former Mayor John H. Richards. Often, they were several pages longer than the version reviewed and approved by the City Council, the records showed.

That’s not the way city business is supposed to be conducted, according to administrators of several other cities in San Gabriel Valley. In their cities, every check is reviewed by the council, they said. And some council members in Bradbury said they were stunned that so much money was spent without their knowledge.

The city and the district attorney already are investigating whether Vollaire bought luxury items for herself with the city credit card and was reimbursed for other personal purchases.

The papers obtained by The Times show that at least $13,000 in reimbursements to Vollaire had never been seen by the council.

Of 18 months for which both the council-approved list and the final list were available, spanning a period of two years, the final expense sheet matched the one passed by the council for half of the months. But the other nine months show expenditures that the full council never saw, involving 164 checks. This excludes payroll-related checks, which council members would have approved as a routine expense.

“We did not know that that was taking place. It wasn’t as if they said, ‘This is what we’re doing,’ ” said Councilwoman Beatrice LaPisto-Kirtley.

Vollaire recently told her that the only checks not appearing on the council’s version of the tally were the payroll checks, LaPisto-Kirtley added.

“Whoever signed off on the (final) warrants should have noticed. And why wasn’t it brought up to the council that there were additional pages submitted? Our checks-and-balance system broke down completely.”

Hon and Richards, who signed the final papers, were out of town and could not be reached for comment late last week. And Vollaire’s attorney, Rayford Fountain, said he had insufficient knowledge about the discrepancies to comment.

The amended check lists, known as warrant registers, contained anywhere from 5 to 44 additional checks per month.

Vollaire, 53, who served as city manager for the past 20 years and also wore the hats of planning director, finance director and city clerk, is in the process of negotiating her termination or resignation with the city.

Several San Gabriel Valley city managers and finance directors said Vollaire’s practice of adding on checks that the City Council never got a chance to review was “highly unusual,” if not unheard-of.

“I have worked with three cities, and there’s virtually nothing that can get processed that does not get by the council,” said South Pasadena’s finance director, Barbara James. “The payroll is prepaid, but those checks always appear on the very next warrant run.”

“What you see is what you get. I mean, we cut checks from that,” added South Pasadena City Manager Kenneth C. Farfsing, who also worked for Santa Fe Springs, La Verne and Downey. “If something were to be added later, we have to go back (to the council). Those are generally accepted municipal accounting practices.”

The same goes for San Marino:

“In our city, the full City Council approves every check,” said City Manager Keith Till. Invoices that must be paid within a few days are handled with prepaid checks, which also appear on the next warrant register for the council’s perusal and approval, he added.

“That’s clearly the norm,” Till said.

Bradbury--the San Gabriel Valley’s most affluent community--is clearly not the norm: Council members concede they ran the tiny city like a “family business,” based on trust.

It was customary for Vollaire to leave the warrant registers open, and add checks to them as they were paid after the council had approved the preliminary list, according to a city employee who asked not to be named.

When the city’s fiscal activity was greatest, at the end of the fiscal and calendar years, Vollaire would continue to add checks until the end of the month, when the mayor or mayor pro tem would come in and sign off on the list.

Those amended lists were filed away.

“They didn’t go back before the council. The mayor never understood that that was necessary,” the employee said. “Who knew? We always thought whatever (Vollaire) did was legitimate, because she did it. It’s a poor excuse, but it’s the one we all have, unfortunately.”

Those practices have already changed, the employee said. The April warrants were approved by the council and signed and no more checks will be added to them.

Council members said that questioning Vollaire about the expenses never seemed to clear things up.

“There was always the excuse that they didn’t have time, or the bills just came in that day,” Councilman Tom Melbourn said. “There’s always a plausible reason for everything, and she had a million of them.”

“We wouldn’t get those amended types of things back to look at. That’s just the whole point of it. We approved stuff from what we could see, and it looked all right. But we didn’t have the receipts. We thought the treasurer, mayor and auditor were checking those things. Obviously there was a lack of diligence on somebody’s part, including our own.”

Councilwoman Audrey Chamberlain said she recently spent seven hours poring over the warrant registers for suspicious-looking reimbursement requests the council might have overlooked. The revelations of alleged wrongdoing by Vollaire have come as a great shock, she said.

“We all feel sick about it,” she said. “I think occasionally somebody said something or made a sarcastic remark (about Vollaire’s reimbursement requests), but we were trusting 100%. Isn’t that terrible?”

Some council members said they didn’t have sufficient time to review the list of checks they were presented with, which they didn’t see until the council meeting.

“We never got a chance to look over them very carefully, because they were presented to us at the meeting,” Chamberlain said. “Some bills do not come in on time for the council meeting. Apparently, Dolly just stuck them on the end.”

A review of the final warrant registers from January, 1991, through February, 1993, shows more than $43,000, most of it approved by the council, was paid into the accounts now being investigated--the city credit card, Vollaire’s credit card, petty cash and other reimbursements. But in February, 1993, when the first formal questioning of Vollaire’s spending began, the total amount in those accounts dropped to $69.

Looking back on it, Melbourn conceded that the amounts the council approved for those accounts were high for a city whose entire 1992-93 operating budget is $384,000.

“Now, in retrospect, yes, they are high,” Melbourn said. “But it’s retrospect. Everyone always had a plausible explanation for them. We trusted, and it came out and bit us.”