The bills keep coming due on the Herman Frazier error — I mean, era — at the University of Hawai'i.

And maybe not just the $312,510 it took to terminate the former athletic director without cause in January. Or, the depth of apparently mounting multi-million dollar budget woes.

Everybody figures to pay for the curious situation surrounding former football coach June Jones' did-he-or-did-he-not contract buy-out.

When Jones bolted for Southern Methodist University after the Sugar Bowl loss, UH claimed it was owed $400,008 in liquidated damages per a clause in the 2003 contract. The contract said that in the event he took another job in football — college or pro — before the June 30, 2008 expiration date of the contract that Jones would pay UH half his annual UH paycheck in liquidated damages.

It is right there in black-and-white on page 11 of the 14-page agreement.

What isn't there in the file copy — but Jones' agent Leigh Steinberg maintains was "explicitly" agreed to by Frazier and reaffirmed on several occasions — was a provision whereby if the coach completed the third year of the five-year deal then he could leave without penalty.

But because it isn't in the file copy, UH wants the money it says it is has been due since March 7. Steinberg maintains there was an agreement and that such "handshake" deals are common practice in sports.

A dodge to avoid coughing up the moolah? Could be. But given the previous administration's track record on seeing things through — football scheduling, contracts etc. — there is a resounding ring of plausibility.

Indeed, we're told that at least one UH coach has vehemently maintained he had an agreement with Frazier on a contract extension but that no paper work has turned up.

In Jones' case, the ex-coach has brought UH many times the $400,008 the school now seeks from him, turning a sad-sack 0-12 team into a Western Athletic Conference champion in 1999 and taking the Warriors to the Bowl Championship Series in his final year. A lot of what Jones provided UH you can't even put a dollar figure on.

But forgiving the liquid damages without documentation is both bad business and opens UH up to the possibility of claims by others. Something UH hardly needs while its athletic department is searching the seat cushions to help make a dent in $4.4 million in accumulated debt.

Jones, apart for any monetary losses he will absorb as a result, is taking a public relations hit. When he departed for SMU for a financial package twice what he had been getting here and above what UH was offering for the future, some saw him, unfairly we thought, as a cash-hungry deserter.

Ultimately, arbitration will likely decide where the buck stops. But the former administration may have already set both parties up as losers.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8044.