Well, faked memos are popping up faster than anything short of a Rathergate special. Now Gordan Quan’s been, er, victimized.

The document with Quan’s initials is dated December 2005 and appears to request that his council office be charged the cost of a newsletter to commemorate the end of his six-year council term. The memo refers to Quan as mayor pro tem, a post he left more than two years prior. It also bears a scrawled “GQ” that is different than other memos with Quan’s initials that the Houston Chronicle has obtained since the pro tem bonuses were revealed Feb. 15.

“These initials are definitely not his,” said Lee, who ran the pro tem office, which handles some administrative duties for council members and their staffs, until fall 2004.

Quan was mayor pro tem — one year spending $50,000 less than his budget — until the end of 2003. He remained in his council office until the end of last year.

At the end of his council term, Quan said, he told pro tem employees he wanted to use surplus money from his council budget to pay for the cost of printing a final newsletter. After he had the work done, he said, pro tem employees rejected an invoice in January, saying it was too late for the transaction. So, Quan said he had to pay for the cost from his campaign funds.

But the pro tem office got credited as though it had paid for the $2,500 charge, according to budget documents previously obtained by the Chronicle. That and the disputed initials raise questions about where the money actually went, he said.

Some comments over at BlogHouston seem to indicate a bit of confusion over the time frame, which is partly the fault of the rushed writing; it makes it harder to pick out the important facts. But hey, that’s what the blogsphere is for. We don’t have the resources to do the legwork, but we’re hell on analysis.

So, in that vein: the implications of what was attempted, as well as what happened, are important. While Quan was mayor pro tem through 2003, he remained a council member until the end of 2005. At that time, he produced a “commemorative newsletter” for distribution in unknown numbers and to unknown parties (or at least not covered by the Chronicle.) In short, Quan wanted to produce, at taxpayer expense, an “ego sheet.” He doesn’t dispute that the request was made, and so far, he hasn’t disputed that the memo is authentic — just that his initials aren’t. Even assuming that the memo is a fake, he isn’t disputing that he tried to get the city taxpayers to foot the bill for this absurd self-pat on the back.

But the contents of the memo are confusing as well. Like the strangly wrong memos regarding payment, there’s a seemingly nonsensical error in this memo. However, in this case, I think the answer is more benign.

The memo refers to Quan as mayor pro tem, a post he left more than two years prior.

The problem is, context for that reference is absent from the article. It’s not too unusual for politicians to be referred to by the highest office they ever held. The owner of a local TV station where I grew up was always referred to as “Governor” despite the fact that he’d held the office for only 30 days, and that was back during the Huey P. Long era. Given that the memo is requesting authorization to pay for a “commemorative newsletter”, it’s only natural that the importance of the politician in question would be played up.

No, I’m sure that the oddity of the title is a red herring. The real questions are:

1. Why did Quan think the taxpayers ought to foot the bill for a self-aggrandizing work that serves no civic purpose whatsoever?

I can’t answer that question, but Quan sure needs to.

2. Why was this request routed to the pro tem’s office, instead of through his own?

Again, Quan needs to answer this. If he’s going to put out such a work, logicially, it should be charged to his own office. But it seems he delayed doing it, or seeing authorization for the expenditure until he was no longer in office, which means he no longer had a budget to charge it against. Deliberate or accident? Is this an example of shifting budget items to the pro tem’s office to hide them, like the DA alledges?

3. What happened to the money?

If Quan was told the request was denied, but the budget shows it was approved, where did the money go? Was there a check cut by the Controller’s office, and if so, to whom?

4. What is the significance of initialing the memo?

Does that mean that Quan is endorsing a piece of paper typed up by his assistants? (i.e.: functional equivilent of signing a procurement request?) What is the point of forging his initials on a request that he acknowledges making? Or should the question be: what is the point of claiming they’re forged? The implications of that inquiry leads to the $64 question:

5. Is this an attempt to shift a questionable item to the pro tem’s budget in order to hide it, as the DA is alledging has happened?

(Edit: What was that I said about analysis? Grrrr. Apparently it’s not an attempt to shift it by Quan, since the article says it requests to charge his office; it’s only after the denial that it’s charged off to the pro tem’s office. By January of 2006, Quan’s office no longer exists physically, although the budget code for it may. Maybe legally it doesn’t. But bear in mind that the people playing games with the denial & budget are Alvarado’s staff, the same people that gave themselves the bonuses. Quan may actually be a victim here. An opportunistic one that tried to get the taxpayer to fund his “ego sheet” though. It hinges on what the initials are supposed to mean.)

(2nd Edit/update: As Isolated Desolation points out, this just goes to show what a lousy job of supervision Alvarado was doing, and how poor the financial controls on the pro tem’s office were. For something that is probably going to be spun to support the ‘Alvarado as victim’ meme, it’s just more evidence of the ‘Alvarado as incompetant’ meme instead.)

Sigh, where’s the Spanish Inquisition when you need it? Nobody ever expects them. . . .

(3rd Update: At least our employees aren’t this inventive . . . )