Operating With Blank Checks and Balances : Finances: Records show that accounting procedures were lacking for many years. The city manager, now the focus of an embezzlement probe, had free rein.

Yearly audits. Three signatures required on every city check. Monthly reviews of expenses by the City Council. And a final review by the mayor of all monthly expenses.

These checks and balances should have prevented Bradbury’s former city manager from spending thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of taxpayer dollars on personal luxury items over the years, using the city credit card, petty cash and reimbursements for her personal credit card expenses. But they didn’t.

Receipts and other documents obtained by The Times show that with city money, Aurora (Dolly) Vollaire dined in fine restaurants and shopped in stores from Beverly Hills to Las Vegas, New York City and Barbados. Her taxpayer-financed purchases included fine china, designer sunglasses and clothing.

The district attorney is investigating allegations that Vollaire, who was fired last month, embezzled funds she was supposed to protect.

What went wrong?

It does not take an accountant to see that something was amiss with the way Vollaire reported her expenditures. Receipts were usually cut in a way that eliminated the vendor names and items purchased. The receipts often did not add up to the amounts Vollaire sought and obtained in reimbursements from the council. And Vollaire added many checks to the city’s monthly expense list after the council had approved a shorter list, putting in for purchases that the full council never saw.

None of Bradbury’s other officials or the auditors hired by the city to annually review its finances accept responsibility for failing to curb Vollaire’s spending practices. But their explanations reveal a city whose treasurer had no accounting experience, where two mayors admit they never checked the expense lists they were signing off on, and where virtually everyone concedes they assumed that routine financial oversight was getting done--by someone else.

Also emerging is a picture of a city government run by Vollaire with an iron fist, an environment in which employees were ordered not to open the city credit card statements, and officials who questioned Vollaire claim they were intimidated and in one case run out of office.

Vollaire’s attorney declined to comment about her purchases or the district attorney’s investigation into them.

A group of Bradbury residents, outraged by the revelations about Vollaire’s spending, last week served recall papers against Mayor Audrey Hon and Councilman Tom Melbourn. Some residents maintain that the entire council should resign.

But most council members, in defending their actions, say Vollaire--who ran the city nearly single-handedly for 20 years--always had acceptable answers to justify her hefty purchases.

“Dolly ran the city as her own principality, and she was the only city official really who saw the details of the financial operation,” said Councilman John H. Richards, who joined the council in 1984 and served as mayor for six years.

Hon and Richards, who during their respective stints as mayor signed Vollaire’s final expense lists over the past seven years, say they never noticed that the dollar amounts they were signing for, and the number of items, often differed significantly from what they and the rest of the council had approved just a few days before.

“When I go in to sign them, I’m assuming they’re exactly the same as what we saw in the packet,” Hon said. “Why would I go over them again? The city looked in good financial condition, and we all trusted the city manager.”

The mayor’s duties also include signing the final checks, and Hon and Richards said they hurriedly placed their signatures next to the city treasurer’s, figuring that someone else was checking Vollaire’s receipts to ensure that her purchases were aboveboard.

Vollaire signed the checks last and sent them off.

Betty Christensen, who has served as Bradbury’s part-time treasurer for the past five years despite her lack of any accounting experience, said she would look over the checks, match them against the list of checks on the warrant register, and add up the total.

She said she figured the auditors from the Pasadena accounting firm of McGladry & Pullen, which has conducted Bradbury’s yearly audits for nearly a decade, would catch any abnormalities.

“All I can say is we were all very trusting. It’s a little city. I did my civic duty and just trusted (Vollaire), and the City Council did too. None of us get paid,” Christensen said.

Richards, who has served on the council since 1984 and was mayor between 1986 and 1991, points to the auditors and Christensen when asked who the watchdog was.

“I felt the auditor would go over the whole set of files, and that the treasurer was ensuring that the checks were cut for the proper purpose,” Richards said.

While Richards said that on occasion he would demand a receipt from Vollaire, which he said upset her greatly, he never looked in the city files.

“The mayor can’t do everything,” Richards said. “You can’t have the mayor setting broad policy, coordinating the meetings, approving the warrant registers, signing the checks, and checking every little piece of paper (to back up the expenditures).”

Hon, who also thought auditors were spot-checking the Vollaire accounts, said she peeked in the city files on two or three occasions, and what she saw satisfied her.

“I may have looked at the files two or three times, and the receipts seemed to add up,” she said.

McGladry & Pullen accountant Christie Kubicek, who handled the Bradbury account, did not return repeated telephone calls. Nor did a senior partner from the accounting firm.

Although Kubicek said at a March City Council meeting that her firm was spot-checking the city files, she reportedly told one councilwoman that the city did not pay for an audit that included the kind of scrutiny that would have caught the irregularities.

“Talking to Christie, she told me that our checks and balances was that the mayor and treasurer should have been checking receipts,” said Councilwoman Beatrice LaPisto-Kirtley.

Despite Kubicek’s assertions to the councilwoman, a city employee said the auditors had the files in front of them. “Whether or not they opened them, you have to get an answer from Christie,” the employee said.

“The way the audit was phrased and everything else, you assumed they had been looking into the city funds,” said Councilman Melbourn, whose district includes several residents who have called for the entire council to resign.

Council members also say that when they approved Vollaire’s expenses each month, the specifics were listed under categories that sounded legitimate.

“All those amounts she stuck under ‘Special Objectives,’ under ‘Meetings and Conferences,’ ” LaPisto-Kirtley said. “She had it hidden in a number of different accounts, so it didn’t send up a red flag.”

While some council members say they trusted Vollaire completely and felt comfortable with her running the small city like a family business, others say they had doubts about her spending but were unable to persuade their colleagues that a probe was needed.

“She always had control of the majority of the council,” LaPisto-Kirtley said. “I don’t know what it was that she did to please everyone to the extent that nobody wanted to question her, but they trusted her completely, with blinders.”

As an example, Melbourn said he and LaPisto-Kirtley tried to get the three other council members to agree to draw up a job description for city manager. “They said no, we might offend Dolly,” he said.

The two employees who work in the tiny cottage that serves as Bradbury’s City Hall say they were instructed to bring the city credit card statements directly to Vollaire--and never to open them.

Former city treasurer Lew Pearce said he once asked Vollaire if he could see the receipts to back up some of her purchases, according to the city attorney and LaPisto-Kirtley. Vollaire refused, the two officials said, and Pearce never took the matter further.

Pearce could not be reached for comment.

Lone council dissenters had been questioning Vollaire for more than a decade. But they rarely got answers and were often made to pay for their vigilance by Vollaire herself, they said.

Mary Stratton, who served on the council in 1980 and was recalled after a series of acrimonious fights with other council members, said she often challenged Vollaire’s expenditures.

On one occasion, the city had paid Vollaire’s full expenses for a Palm Springs conference. Stratton paid her own way, she recalled recently, and told the council that Vollaire never even showed up. But her criticisms were rebuffed by the council majority, Stratton said.

Charles Vallas, who had raised questions about a number of Vollaire’s actions, was ousted from the council in 1984 at Vollaire’s urging after he was absent for two months--absences he said were excused and legitimate.

“In the council I would ask, ‘Why did we have to spend this much? Why did we have to hire so-and-so? Why did this never go to bid?” said Vallas, 75, now visiting Bradbury from his Florida home, where he moved in 1986. “The rest of the people would get irritated with me because I would ask.”

In a February, 1984, letter to his constituents, Vallas claimed that Vollaire had sought his ouster because he objected to her attempts to get a city-paid car and hefty raises.

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