Limestone County Water and Sewer Authority board Chairman Mark Yarbrough is partners in limited liability corporations, Bent Brook Phase One LLC and Bent Brook Phase Two LLC, with Fred Pepper, one of the partners of certified public accounting firm Christopher, Durham, Pepper and Armstrong.

CDPA has been employed by the authority to conduct annual audits for the past 24 years.

The General Accounting Office in Washington’s Government Auditing Standards (1994 revision), Amendment 3, states:

“In all matters related to audit work, the audit organization and the individual auditor, whether government or public, should be free both in fact and appearance from personal, external, and organizational impairments to independence.”

Pepper, however, while one of the principals in CDPA, did not physically conduct authority audits. The audits in recent years have been conducted by Cecil Armstrong Jr. and Annette Barnes of CDPA.

Papers dated March 3, 2006, on file with Alabama Secretary of State Beth Chapman’s office in Montgomery list the partners of Bent Brook LLC Phase One and Bent Brook LLC Phase Two as Mark Yarbrough, Terry McDonald, Neal Swann Johnston, John William Johnson, Mitchell K. Shelly, John Plunk, Fred Pepper and James M. Corder.

As of Wednesday the Alabama Department of Revenue holds Certificates of Good Standing on the LLCs.

Papers on file with the Madison County Probate Judge’s Office and signed by Yarbrough and Shelly, an Athens attorney in the firm of Alexander, Corder, Plunk & Shelly, show that Bent Brook Phase One borrowed $1,987,500 and Bent Brook Phase Two borrowed $2,062,500 from First American Bank for the development of 19.6 acres at Nance and Harbin roads in far western Madison County.

“I was involved in one real estate transaction with him (Yarbrough) during the last 18 months,” said Pepper. “I am a limited partner and I didn’t even know Mark. It sure didn’t have anything to do with the stuff that’s going on with the water board.”

Yarbrough, owner of All Power Construction of Toney, was appointed to the board by the Limestone County Commission in 2005 to replace Nancy Stevenson, who resigned. Yarbrough was elected board chairman in January 2007 after 15-year board chairman Bobby Gilbert was not reappointed by the commission.

In April the water board fired its legal counsel Jim Moffatt after friction arose between him and Yarbrough when Moffatt questioned the ethics of a road-building contractor serving on the water board.

Earlier this month, the water board fired three-year general manager Tony Sneed and comptroller Harvey Cooper after they disputed findings of CDPA accountants Cecil Armstrong Jr. and Annette Barnes, which found that the authority was failing two bond tests.

Bond tests are submitted every six months to determine a utility’s eligibility for construction bonds and determine the rates the utility must charge customers to repay the bond.

The board gave no reason for terminating Sneed’s contract other than to say in a written statement that, “it is in the best interest of all parties concerned to go in a different direction with the General Manager position.”

Cooper was not under contract and it did not take board approval to fire him.