It’s going to take a special meeting tonight for Lehighton Area School District’s board of directors to pay its bills this month.

Two votes to pay bills for February, totaling $2,721,822.21, failed during Monday’s board meeting after director David Bradley said several pages of payroll information were illegible and another director, Richard Beltz, said he found errors on two other invoices.

“There were time sheets that were illegible,” Bradley said. “If anyone turned in homework that was not legible, it would not be graded as passable. I think we should postpone until we get the documents before we release the dollars.”

Because it involved payroll, those dollars have already been released to the employees. Any problems would have to be corrected on a future payroll run.

Lehighton Business Manager Edward Rarick said Bradley did bring up the legibility issue when reviewing documents.

“The remediation was for us to pull those particular documents and resend them,” Rarick.

The board deadlocked 4-4 on the first vote to pay the bills, which included the payroll. Voting against the bill payment were Bradley, Beltz, Gail Maholick and Joy Beers. Larry Stern, Nathan Foeller, Rita Spinelli and Stephen Holland voted in favor of the payments.

“You need five votes to spend money, so in essence the board voted to not pay the bills this month,” Solicitor Eric Filer said of the vote ramifications.

After the vote failed, upon being asked by Stern, no board members voiced objection to a meeting Wednesday at 7 p.m. to reconsider the bills.

Beltz said he joined Bradley in pulling random invoices prior to Monday’s meeting, during which he found errors on two of them.

When pushed to the explain what the errors were, however, Beltz did not give specifics

“I don’t think I can speak about it outside of executive session,” he said.

Spinelli said Beltz didn’t bring the topic up in executive session either.

“I’d just to like know if it was overpaid, underpaid, what was it?” asked Spinelli. “How am I supposed to believe him? We’re always told that when we say something and can’t back it up that we can’t be believed. That is how I feel right now.”

Cleaver said he believes the invoices in question dealt with athletic equipment and a student placement.

Bradley also didn’t give specifics on what was wrong with the two invoices.

“They didn’t meet the requirements for a board member to approve them with fidelity,” he said.

Wayne Wentz was absent at the time of the first vote and the scheduling of the Wednesday night meeting, though he joined the meeting later. After he joined the meeting, Stern called for another vote on the bills, which set off Beltz.

“This is ridiculous,” Beltz said. “You have the majority and you’re taking advantage of it.”

Wentz, however, said other board members have arrived late to meetings in the past and have been allowed to vote on items.

“They just want to take my right away to vote,” Wentz said. “That isn’t fair.”

The second vote did take place, but failed 5-4 when Holland switched his vote to no.

Cleaver said tonight’s meeting would deal only with the bill payment and another item, the approval of Conrad Siegel for the district’s GASB75 Valuation Services, a government accounting standard applied to postemployment benefits, in the amount of $7,225.