The mess in the Pro Tem’s office is getting worse by the day it seems. As I noted a few days ago, Muni channel tapes indicate that Judy Johnson and Carol Alvarado agreed that someone from F&A would be assigned to the pro tem’s office full time in order to reconcile the budgets. This morning, Matt Stiles over at the Chronicle has a new article pointing out that the budget overruns happened despite that.
For some, the figures also raise questions about why city officials didn’t notice the budget overruns, especially while a Finance and Administration Department employee was assigned to compile spending reports for council offices, including the pro tem office, each month.
Alvarado has taken Houblog’s advice and choked on her own foot, rather than risked saying anything else foolish. All questions are now being referred, not to a city spokesperson, but to a political consultant, the once-powerful Marc Campos.
Mayor Pro Tem Carol Alvarado, who oversees the office in addition to her elected job representing council District I, says she wasn’t alerted. “That’s why they call them checks and balances,” said Marc Campos, Alvarado’s political consultant.
Okaaaaaay, I think we see why he’s “once-powerful.� That was helpful.
He questioned why city finance officials didn’t say, ‘Hey, we might have a problem there.’
So, it’s F&A’s fault that Alvarado hired a crook. Yeah, that’s helpful, all right.
The addition of a special assistant from the F&A office is rather odd to start with; I don’t think any other departments have that. And if they do, well, an entire department is a bit larger than the aggregate of 14 council members staffs plus the pro tem’s office. Still, it doesn’t seem to have helped.
And, with more than four months left in the fiscal year, the records show the office has spent all but $56,000 of its $326,000 budget.
Put another way, they have 18% of the budget left for 25% of the year. Gosh, I guess the bonuses were going to have to slow down anyway. Actually, considering that only $11,000 of that remainder was allocated to salaries, it was probably going to come completely unglued soon anyway.
“If these people were siphoning money for unauthorized bonuses and raises,” Michel wondered, “what was their plan for the final quarter, when the reality of what was in the account caught up to this?”
I only say ‘probably’ because this just doesn’t add up: with a special budget assistant from F&A, how is it the problem had to be revealed through employee gossip? Now, I don’t think that Johnson was in on this; if the head of F&A had been involved, it would have been near impossible to discover anything. I think. But at the very least, she was more worried about deflecting blame for budget irregularities than getting to the bottom of why they were occurring. In KHOU’s excerpts from the Muni channel, she can be seen diverting Goldberg from inquiries about the increased budget by wandering off into minutiae of how much copies cost. Visibly frustrated, he dropped that line of inquiry and delved into the pay budgeted for temp employees… of which they had none.
“It was all doublespeak,” said former Councilman Mark Goldberg, referring to the justifications given last summer for increasing the office’s spending. “It was all a lie.”
And one it looks like you tried to get to the bottom of. Once again, term limits bite us on the ass; by the time someone learns enough to ask the right questions, they’re limited right out of office.
On the other hand, we’ve got better numbers on exactly what was going on in the pro tem’s office and the other council members:
Twenty other council employees, by comparison, received bonuses in the last two years ranging from $1,000 to $8,500, according to documents city officials released Thursday.
All of them, however, were approved by council members, and the highest annual bonus amount was still less than half of the smallest received by any of the four pro tem employees.
Ah, excellent. This mess is answering so many questions I’ve had for a while now. We finally know just how well they treat their aides. Let me be clear: over eight thousand dollars in bonus money only looks small in comparison to the Gang of Four’s depredations. That’s still an insane amount in bonus money from the point of view of city rank and file employees, who can expect to see the same bonus on their paycheck every payday: $0.00.
I bet we’ll be hearing from the unions about that, real soon now.
- SEIU
- AFSCME
Oh, wait, they probably think it’s a bad idea to draw attention to employee malfeasence, even when it’s enabled by a culture of favoritism and lack of oversight. Never mind. Moving right along. . .
The records also gave a more detailed accounting of the pro tem employees’ bonuses. Previous totals were compiled from 2005 payroll records. The employees also received one bonus in 2004 and another in 2006, bringing the total to $143,500, according to the records.
Ah, but we’re not done yet…. Let’s look back a little further:
Under former Mayor Pro Tem Jew Don Boney, she said, the budget had topped $300,000.
A Mayor Pro Tem who was appointed by former Mayor Outta Town Brown. With the number of officials from that administration already in deep kimchee and the bonuses they got just before leaving office, perhaps we need to be digging a little deeper, eh?
Additional commentary at BlogHouston.
