Payment of the bills is one of the most taken for granted motions on a school district's agenda.

For a brief moment Monday night, it looked as if Lehighton Area School District wouldn't be writing any checks this month.By a 5-4 vote, however, the board agreed to pay $3.47 million in bills made up of general fund, benefits, payroll, food service fund and athletic fund payments.At issue were three bills totaling $52,191.46 from Barry Isett and Associates, the engineering firm working on Lehighton's proposed $5 million sports stadium, to be constructed on the campus off Union Street."I'd like to know what they did for that amount of money," said board member William Hill Jr."We need every penny we can get right now and maybe some of this stuff can be put on the back burner. Right now, we need to focus on fixing the high school and middle school."Brian Feick, district business manager, said he didn't have the bills with him at Monday's meeting to get an itemized look at the charges levied by the firm. He said he would pull the bills for a future meeting.Monday night's agenda did include a note that said board members with questions about individual bills should contact the business office before the meeting.Superintendent Jonathan Cleaver said the board previously approved a contract with Barry Isett and Associates.The approval, in November, called for the firm to complete designs for the proposed multipurpose stadium at an estimated cost of $358,000."This is part of that work," Cleaver said.Hill, Rocky Ahner, Hal Resh and Lori Nothstein voted against paying the bills, while Gloria Bowman, Wayne Wentz, Andrew Yenser, Stephen Holland and Larry Stern voted to pay them.Yenser made the motion to pay all the bills, including the three in question. After discussion about pulling the three out and voting on them individually, he let the original motion stand."We approved the original contract with the engineer so I'll keep it the way it is," he said.Ahner's suggestion was to pay all the bills except the three in question and review the questionable bills at the next meeting."We're not talking about the dollar limit on engineering, the issue is spending a tremendous amount of money without seeing justification," he said.The vote baffled Mahoning Township resident Wilmer Everetts, who compared it to paying a bill from a mechanic without even looking at what work was done to your vehicle."You wouldn't do that with your own money," Everetts told the board. "That goes to prove that something rotten is going on here."Bowman said she had "a lot of faith in Mr. Feick."After the vote, the board unanimously approved a motion by Hill to pull out any bills related to professional services for construction projects and make them individual agenda items in the future.The stadium project calls for an artificial turf field inside the existing track; constructing a visitor and home grandstand, press box, 62-foot by 260-foot field house, 42-foot by 74-foot restroom/maintenance building, a 119-vehicle paved parking lot and a 100-vehicle grass overflow lot; and installing a new lighting system for the field and paved parking areas.The Carbon County Planning Commission voted on Sept. 16 to recommend conditional plan rejection for the stadium plan based on 22 areas that do not currently comply with Lehighton's subdivision and land development ordinance."I have a problem with people being allowed to turn in bills and not have the correct information for us," Ahner said."We're paying good money and these plans should come back correct. There shouldn't be 22 things wrong."In addition to the stadium project, the district is proposing three building projects including a new $32.5 million elementary center for all K-5 students, and $20 million in renovations to its middle and high schools.The board, on Monday, approved a letter of agreement with Maryland-Pennsylvania Trane to prepare a detailed, $36,000 energy savings audit at the middle school."We should have the results back by the first week of January," Hill said. "Then we'll decide what parts of it we want to cherry pick."