Langley City Councilman Robert Gilman said Monday he has not reviewed the records that are at the center of the controversy swirling around Mayor Paul Samuelson’s work hours.

The brouhaha began last week, after the public release of a whistleblower letter sent by City Treasurer Debbie Mahler to Island County Prosecutor Greg Banks.

In the letter, Mahler raised concerns about “improper actions” by the mayor and asked for an investigation. Mahler said the mayor had been claiming to be working on city business 40 hours a week while he was in California on vacation. And she also claimed that Samuelson was creating time sheets that showed he was working the 40 hours mandated each week by the council, even when he was out of the state.

Earlier this week, Gilman said he had not looked at the mayor’s time sheets.

But he added that he was sure the city was getting its money’s worth from Langley’s first full-time mayor.

“My impression from working with him and talking with him on the phone when he’s not in Langley, and working with him when he is in Langley, I’m not particularly concerned about the amount of time he has been putting in,” Gilman said. “I feel he has been putting in what averages to be more than 40 hours a week.”

According to the letter sent to the county prosecutor, Mahler said the dispute came to a head in December after Samuelson was away on four out-of-state trips to visit family. Mahler said she was concerned about authorizing paychecks for the mayor that included pay for vacation time that wasn’t earned, and contacted the state auditor’s office, where she was told it was an improper “gift of public funds.”

The concern over the mayor’s work hours eventually led to the council’s approval of an ordinance in February that said the mayor would be required to create a written record of all of his work hours. The ordinance required the mayor to submit that documentation to the city clerk/treasurer on a semi-monthly basis.

Samuelson said last week he has been preparing time sheets since January, and that he has made time sheets for all of 2010 and the last quarter of 2009.

Gilman said he was still reviewing the issues involved in the pay dispute, and said it was too soon to know if the council would take further legislative action. He said it was also unclear how much authority the council had to regulate the mayor’s working hours, as the mayor is a separately elected official.

“I’m trying to understand the issues, and also see if what needs to happen is if we need to clean up the ordinances,” he said.

Part of the problem stems from an earlier ordinance, passed by the council in December 2008, that deemed Samuelson as “an employee of the city” who was due the same annual salary and benefits as the city’s department heads.

“If we had a misstep here, it was that we didn’t deeply consider that aspect of whether or not the mayor should be described as an employee or not,” Gilman said.

“I don’t recall any discussion around vacation time,” he added. “My sense is that it doesn’t make sense to try to set the mayor up with that kind of accruable vacation time.”