City employees may have taken $130K in illegal bonuses

More on yesterday's raid of the mayor pro tem's office: City investigators are looking into allegations that City Council staffers gave themselves $130,000 in bonuses, bringing up questions about the city's payroll process as a whole.

Though city employees get bonuses, they're generally small, rare and require a lot of paperwork. But the manager of the mayor pro tem's office, who makes $78,000 a year, got a whopping $47,500 bonus in 2005 — making her one of the 20 highest-paid city employees. (By comparison, City Council members make about $50,000 a year and their top-level staffers make around $60,000.) The office manager and three other employees were placed on administrative leave.

It's not clear at this point exactly what went on — if anything — at the mayor pro tem's office, which manages the administrative functions of City Council members' offices. As Mayor Bill White said, the investigation could widen as investigators try to figure out how the illegal bonuses were arranged and whether people in other departments helped. From a media standpoint, it's interesting to us that the Chronicle didn't publish the names of the accused staffers because they hadn't yet been charged with anything (and neither did KTRK or KPRC, possibly for the same reason) — but KHOU did.