Local media keeps digging and this time it’s the Chron‘s Matt Stiles who has the latest twist in the scandal at the Mayor Pro Tem’s office:
Another memo found in the City Hall office where employees received improper bonuses appears forged — this one bearing the initials of former City Councilman Gordon Quan.
The document to the Office of Mayor Pro Tem, which purportedly authorizes spending $2,500 for a newsletter, contains initials that Quan and Alice Lee, his former office manager, say are forged.
“It’s clearly not my handwriting,” Quan said Thursday.
“It wasn’t really even close to my initials,” he said later.
[snip]
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.
[snip]
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.
What in the heck was going on in that office? It seems that forging initials, shuffling money, and lying were just part of the daily routine.
UPDATE: And now the DA’s office has seized computers and Blackberrys from Councilwoman Alvarado’s council office:
This marks a change in the investigation because prior to this the focus had always been Alvarado’s mayor pro tem office, not her council office.
The D.A.’s office considers the equipment to be potential evidence in the broader investigation into the procedures of the mayor pro tem’s office.
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