The four former mayor pro tem employees accused of taking $200,000 in illegal bonuses and payraises are scheduled to appear in court today after three of them surrendered for processing at the Harris County Jail and posted bond yesterday.
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Results tagged “rositahernandez”
Two of the four former mayor pro tem employees who were fired this spring, accused of giving themselves nearly $200,000 in unauthorized payraises and bonuses, testified before a grand jury yesterday — and though we don't know what happened in the grand jury session, prosecutors said the panel will consider bringing felony charges of tampering with a government record or theft by a public servant against the group. "We're trying to get this thing before...
We were sitting around this weekend wondering what happened to everyone's favorite city councilwoman — no, not that one; we're talking about Carol Alvarado, who stepped down as mayor pro-tem after it was discovered staffers in her pro-tem office took $143,000 in unauthorized pay bonuses. It's been quite a while since we heard anything in the pro-tem case, but now, finally, there's some news: The four dismissed pro-tem employees and Alvarado herself will testify before...
City Councilwoman and former Mayor Pro Tem Carol Alvarado used at least four city employees to set up meetings with a personal client who has paid her nearly $75,000 in consulting fees since 2002, despite her earlier assertion that she never asked staffers to do non-city work, the Chronicle reports today. Messages from Alvarado's city e-mail account show Alvarado asked city workers to set up meetings on several occasions with San Antonio buinessman Rudy Rodriguez,...
Rosita Hernandez and Christopher Mays, two former mayor pro tem employees accused of taking part in nearly $200,000 in unauthorized payraises and bonuses, are having their say today at a Civil Service Commission hearing. City employees who are dismissed have the option of the appeals hearings, at which they can give reasons they should be allowed to keep their jobs.
Wow — we almost thought we were going to go a week without news of another development in the City Hall payroll scandal. Sure, there was the story of Rosita Hernandez's amazing disappearing GED, but that didn't really count as breaking news. Fortunately, there is something as we close out the week: The FBI has asked for the bank records of former Mayor Pro Tem Carol Alvarado, though DA Chuch Rosenthal said she's not the...
The Chronicle looks today at the City Hall career of Rosita Hernandez, the former manager of the mayor pro tem's office — and finds that it started with a lie. When Rosita Hernandez applied for a job as a municipal court secretary in 1994, she wrote on her application that she graduated from Bell High School in Los Angeles County in 1983. But the school said she actually dropped out in the 10th grade to move to Texas. Oops!
More developments in the soap opera that is the mayor pro tem's office: Two former employees talked to the media Monday, one who was fired earlier this month for taking what officials say were unauthorized payraises and bonuses and another who was let go months ago under odd circumstances. Christopher Mays, who was among the four pro tem employees dismissed in the payroll scandal, told KPRC yesterday that his signature had been forged several times...
Another day, another story from City Hall: This time, another seemingly forged mayor pro tem memo has been found, but this time it bears the initials of former City Councilman and Mayor Pro Tem Gordon Quan. The memo, dated December 2005, authorizes $2,500 for a newsletter, but Quan and his former office manager said the initials on it aren't his. "It wasn't really even close to my initials," Quan said.
Rosita Hernandez, one of the mayor pro tem office employees who lost their jobs last week over a payroll scandal, appealed her dismissal today, maintaining that she did nothing wrong. As Hernandez's attorney, Walter A. Boyd III, said:
Investigators with the Harris County's DA's office seized more than 15 boxes of records from the mayor pro tem's office Tuesday, the same day an April 2005 memo came to light in which former Pro Tem Office Manager Rosita Hernandez asked then-Mayor Pro Tem Carol Alvarado to approve $5,500 in bonuses. Hernandez and the three other pro tem employees were fired last week for taking $143,000 in bonuses city officials say were unauthorized.
The latest twist in the mayor pro tem saga: The discovery of a dented filing cabinet in City Hall that may or may not have been jimmied open to retrieve ... well, we're not sure what. The black, 5-foot cabinet was kept in an unlocked City Hall break room adjacent to the pro tem office, where four workers reportedly helped themselves to a couple hundred thousand dollars in unauthorized payraises and bonuses. The damage to the file drawer — a "visible dent just above a drawer handle," according to the Chronicle — was discovered when an employee asked the City Hall Annex building manager to unlock the cabinet to get documents that had been requested under the Texas Public Information Act.
The four employees of the mayor pro tem's office have been fired, the Chronicle reports:
As the four employees in the mayor pro tem's office wait for word today on whether they'll lose their jobs (though KHOU says they already know), there are still questions about exactly how they got away with giving themselves about $200,000 in payraises and bonuses. Yesterday, the attorney for office manager Rosita Hernandez said Hernandez didn't steal taxpayers' money and alleged Mayor Pro Tem Carol Alvarado knew about the raises and bonuses — in other words, if Hernandez goes, it looks like she'll try to take Alvarado with her.
There's nothing like television news to give us something pointless to look at while we're waiting for something interesting to happen. Today, KHOU obliged by giving us a report on two of the mayor pro tem employees arriving at City Hall for their dismissal hearings. Teresa Orta and Christopher Mays were two lower-level employees in the mayor pro tem's office; though they took unauthorized bonuses and payraises, Mayor Bill White has incidated they didn't engineer the pay increases, but rather just went along with them.
More news from the mayor pro tem's office this morning: In addition to more than $130,000 in unauthorized bonuses, employees there also seem to have given each other $60,000 in pay raises during Carol Alvarado's two-year yerm as mayor pro tem. The raises, which ranged from 11 percent to 64 percent, were found in records released to the Chronicle yesterday.
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