KPRC has posted to their website that council member Addie Wiseman has issued a press statement asking, in effect, What’s Up, Doc? (Adobe pdf file, reader available here.) She’s not pulling any punches.

. . .I have great concern over the manner in which City Council has been left virtually in the dark on the matter of the previously disclosed payroll irregularities. . . It is unacceptable to dismiss the inquiries made by members of Council and to expect that media reports are sufficient sources of information on this matter.

Actually, I’ve got greater concern over how the citizens are being left in the dark; this is one case where I can definately say the public should know everything the council does. Which is not to say, almost nothing, the current state of affairs.

She then goes on to pose some difficult questions, that I wager we’re going to see a lot of fumbling around, and inconclusive answers to.

Specifically, I pose the following questions: What prompted this investigation? What is the current status of this investigation? What timeline may be expected for its completion? Why has the District Attorney not been asked to take part in this investigation? . . . In what manner are you proposing for City council to make up the difference in the proposed and actual state of the budget?
(Emphasis added.)

The bolded question is the important one. The DA is the one charged with prosecuting any crimes against the public interest. So why is he sitting back on his fundament, wating on the OIG to hand to him whatever it chooses to? Without DA investigators looking into the matter on their own, Chuck Rosenthal will have no idea if the report has any, er, omissions in it. Could it be that, when it comes to the public interest, the DA has no interest? He’s responsible for the prosecution of crime, not “all crime except that involving the City of Houston.”

But now, the knives come out!

I do not wish to appear insensitive to the plight of my colleague, but we, as office holders of the City of Houston have the responsibility to ensure proper accountability of the taxpayers’ funds.

Whamo!!! “Now that I’ve reminded everyone you suck, Ms. Alvarado; ‘Thank you, please drive through.'”

Thank you in advance for your prompt reply.

Here’s hoping it’s more prompt than the ones the public have been getting.

Could this get any more lame? Carol Alvarado circles the wagons, hiring top-gun lawyer Rusty Hardin and a PR firm to bail her out of the very public difficulties her lack of oversight has gotten her into.

The PR firm is Austin-based Public Strategies.

Joe Householder of Public Strategies confirmed that Alvarado hired Hardin and the firm in an effort to seek advice regarding the ongoing investigation. He added that the firm will provide an assessment of the current situation and offer suggestions as to how to correct the system so that the incidents are not repeated

Hahahahahahaha. I see they’re hard at work already, that is, if anyone believes a public relations firm would or should be making recommendations on City of Houston procedures. That’s spin for you: “No she’s not more interested in her political career than in fixing the problem, that’s why she hired us!”

Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.

So far, I’ve received no inquiries from them about buying ad space on Houblog.

Anyway, BlogHouston is on the job, and I seem to be having a relapse, so my promised article on Vasquez’s op-ed piece will have to wait half finished. Going to rest now….

Update: Ok, I couldn’t let this snark pass…

Alvarado’s new team and her talk with investigators today coincided with word that the budget analyst who worked part time in the mayor pro tem office will return full-time to the Finance and Administration Department.

Mayor Bill White’s spokesman, Frank Michel, said the move wasn’t related to the payroll scandal involving $143,000 in what city officials say were improper bonuses.

No, it’s related to the fact that all four reasons they needed the extra person have been suspended, and they brought back someone competant to run the office.

I missed the Chron’s editorial page, but Kevin didn’t over at BlogHouston. Reading through the original, I think I’m going to have a few words to say. . . . but it will be late today before I can do a full review. This standout paragraph begs to be quoted now, though:

The investigation must also allow for Alvarado to clear her name by giving a full account of her role in what happened. By all accounts, Carol Alvarado had a promising political career ahead. She has been mentioned as a potential candidate for state senator, mayor and Congress. All of that goes down the drain if she is not allowed the opportunity to answer direct questions as part of the investigation. If Council Member Alvarado were not interviewed as part of the investigation, it would be a travesty bordering on a political cover-up.

No, Councilmember Vasquez, the investigation must find out what happened. If that allows Alvarado to “clear her name” well and good. If it doesn’t (as in, it reveals wrongdoing on her part), TFB. And just who is trying to deny her the opportunity to answer direct questions, which is what you seem to be hinting? Certainly not Houblog, for all that I’ve said the smartest thing she could do is shut up. Oh look, the victim card didn’t work, lets start waving the “shadowy conspiricy card.” And interviewed by whom, anyway? The DA? The OIG? I thought the second already had, and the first was still waiting on the whitewash report to be delivered?

I suppose this could be explained by the minority bloc closing ranks with one of their own, but it feels wrong, like there’s something else playing here. Just how big were the bonuses passed out back when Vasquez was in office? Someone was passing out “legitimate” bonuses of over $8,000 to their aides. (Edit: that’s a quarter of what I make in a year, folks. Yes, I’m a bit ticked off.)

And finally, in an unrelated matter, the Danger Train is not the Submarine Train. Glub.

Note: The title is correct in referring to Mr. Vasquez as a former council member. The blurb at the bottom of the op-ed piece is in error. He is the former council member for District H, which is now represented by Adrian Garcia.

Update: Is there any special reason this is front page news today? The Chron’s Washington bureau is certainly trying to earn its keep. “Yoo hoo! Never mind Alvarado, lookit this!” Is it a coincidence that $130k is the first number to appear in the article?

In April, the federal government spent more than $130,000 on food and lodging for lawmakers who attended the funeral of Pope John Paul II and later the installation of Pope Benedict XVI in Vatican City.

I think not. They had to reach back nearly a year for that one.

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.

1. SEIU
2. 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.

I was wondering how long it would take. The first knife has come out, and it’s exactly who you’d expect it to be from!

City council member Shelly Sekula-Gibbs is calling for an independent audit of all departments affected. In a memo obtained Thursday, Sekula-Gibbs made an official request, and offered $10,000 from her council office’s budget to help pay for the audit.

Oh, yeah baby. I wonder what Ms. Alvarado is calling her tonight? I had missed that she was even offering money out of her own budget.

I just hope that by “all departments” she means council member offices too, but I doubt it. If she does, look for her proposal to gain minimal support. It looks like the need may really be there for it though:

…KPRC found a document signed by Alvarado in late 2004 that granted Hernandez and Watkins significant financial authority. It may not have been intended to let the group give raises to each other, but it made it easier, the station reported.

.

Update: KHOU moved the link to the tapes off the front page, so I have updated my link accordingly.
KHOU has three tapes taken by the muni channel during the 2005 budget workshop. Goldberg is asking some tough questions of the F&A director; Carol Alvarado is also offering some explanations. I don’t know if it’s just the advantage of knowing there was something screwy, but these answers don’t sound right to me. Now I can see some of the questions stumping Ms. Johnson, such as “What professional memberships are we paying for?” That’s actually a difficult ‘detail’ question. But others just had my bullshit detector going off.

But where alarm bells should have been going off all over the city was during this exchange. Ms. Alvarado is speaking of the pro tem’s office handling the budget for the individual members’ offices:

The problem we’ve been seeing is that F&A would have one budget and one set of numbers and the pro tem office would have another and there were quite a few discrepancies…

Continue reading →

Following is the text of the apolgoy delivered by councilmember and Mayor pro tem Carol Alvarado in today’s City Council meeting, thanks to KTRK.

“Mayor and colleagues, I would like to take a brief moment to comment on the recent events in the Mayor Pro Tem Office.

Serving as Mayor Pro Tem is an honor and a privilege that I assure you, I do not take lightly. I would never do anything to jeopardize the integrity of this position or to compromise the essential services the office provides. Like everyone here, I was shocked at the reports of payroll irregularities.

I want to apologize for any disruptions this investigation may have caused in how we conduct the business of this council. We have re-staffed the Mayor Pro-Tem office and we are doing our best to continue to operate with minimal distractions.

I also want to reiterate that I fully support the OIG’s investigation. Like everyone else, I am eager to determine what really happened. We still don’t have all the information and shouldn’t speculate until the investigation is complete and we have all the facts.

I have been astonished and disappointed to discover how easy it was for someone — to forge my initials and steal both the taxpayers’ dollars and my personal reputation at the same time

As you can all imagine, the events of the past week have been a test of my spirit. I have had to deal with rumor, innuendo, and outright distortion of fact that I would never wish upon anyone, although, sadly, it could happen to you.

In this age of identity theft, we are all vulnerable and as public officials, we are perhaps even more at risk — dependent and trusting of our staff to help us get through every packed calendar day. Forgery is criminal and a form of identity theft that I hope none of you should ever have to endure.

I look forward to getting to the bottom of this situation, moving forward, and making sure it never happens again. Unfortunately, we have a process that is flawed. We need to review the procedures that have been in place and make the needed changes to implement foolproof systems and prevent future irregularities.

We also need to review oversight systems at every level so that no city employee is able to get away with this type of illegal activity over a prolonged period of time.

Thank you”

Ok, I read through it all, and I while I could fisk and snark my way through the whole steaming pile (this really belongs over at TBIFOC), I am just going to point out one thing and let it be.

Carol Alvarado apologized to her colleagues on the council. She did not apologize to the hard-working employees of the City of Houston, whose reputations she allowed her staff to tarnish, and she sure as hell didn’t apologize to her constituents in District I, or the rest of the taxpaying citizens of Houston, whom she has let down.

‘Nuff said.