The Mayor Pro Tem employees who were fired by the city have had their firings upheld by the Civil Service Commission, but they didn’t go down without a fight, and there are some new revelations about Bonusgate:
The Civil Service Commission for Municipal Employees rejected their appeals early this morning after a marathon hearing in which Councilwoman Carol Alvarado and a former employee gave conflicting, sworn testimony about whether she gave permission for four employees to get large bonuses.
[snip]
But attorneys for the employees elicited revelations that Alvarado had been notified that pro tem employees were getting large bonuses, and that her council office employees received significant pay increases.
Alvarado denied ever reading the notification, saying she was copied an e-mail that she apparently never read. In it, finance officials said the pro tem employees received $18,000 in bonuses in fiscal 2005.
She also said the fact that her employees received higher salaries for a few months in early 2005 was a mistake by Hernandez. She said the extra money was a misunderstanding that was corrected after a few months, and that she stayed within her annual budget by reducing the same employees’ pay.
KHOU-11 has more on the pay raises at Alvarado’s district office:
During the meeting on the bonuses Tuesday night, Alvarado said that Rosie Hernandez was ordered to give yearly pay raises to the staff in her District I office.
Instead, Hernandez reportedly gave the total yearly raises on every bi-weekly pay check.
That was discovered in the spring of 2005.
We asked Alvarado the obvious question, why didn’t she fire Hernandez back then?
“Now that I look back upon it, I’m not sure if that was an honest mistake. She may have been doing it intentionally to make it look like this was happening in both offices. But immediately, when we discovered what was happening, it was corrected, and my district staff took a cut in pay,” Alvarado said.
Well, well. Alvarado admits Hernandez was authorized to give pay raises to her district office staff. Allegedly Hernandez didn’t handle the raise the way Alvarado intended, but still. Up until now I believe (glancing through bH’s archives) Alvarado has claimed ignorance about any sort of pay raise. Now she admits she did tell Hernandez to take care of the paperwork for bonuses for her district office. And let’s not forget that “Alvarado tried to change the system in order to give one of the accused employees, Rosie Hernandez, more power over payroll.” Other council members put the brakes on that plan.
This is not to say that Councilwoman Alvarado has done anything wrong, but it would seem that some of her actions (and a tremendous lack of oversight) allowed the improper bonus problem to snowball out of control.
KEVIN WHITED ADDS: Does this mean that there IS a fireable offense at the City of Houston?
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