Counting Heads
Harris County taxpayers are spending eight million dollars to run our DEI department, and while that stuff may be ending in Washington our Democratic Commissioners court has allowed the budget to swell 500 percent in the last few years. That’s why “Dogefino” is COUNTING HEADS.
Counting Heads
So many wasteful things came out of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The “work from home” movement was one of them.
The Texas governor has said, “no more.”
It follows the president signing an executive order telling federal workers to get to the office full time.
We told you some Harris County departments are being run almost totally remote.
The Office of Management and Budget had no one full time in the office.
The Department of Economic Equity and Opportunity, our version of DEI, only 2 of its 67 employees come to the office full time.
And now there is evidence they really aren’t doing what we already pay them $8,500,000 to do, like monitoring the county’s goal of providing nearly a third of Harris County contracts to minority- and women-owned firms.
In February, Maya Thornton, the director of what they call inclusive procurements, gave commissioners an update.
Thornton is making $190,000 a year in that job.
Look at the Equity Department website, it says they are supposed to do site visits on Harris County vendors to make sure they are complying with the county’s M/WBE program.
For several weeks, we’ve been asking for documentation of those site visits and gotten nothing.
We figured it would be easy to produce. The department claims to have conducted more than 1,030 site visits by their Worker and Community Protection Team, they check on worker safety at construction projects.
But when we demanded an answer about the M/WBE site visits, we finally heard from the head of the department.
Executive Director Estella Gonzalez confirmed to us by email that her people haven’t been monitoring M/WBE contracts—not one.
She claims staffing shortages have kept them from doing site visits on M/WBE contractors, but they’re going to start in July, blaming manpower and the never-ending need for more money.
Gonzalez makes $259,000 and gets to work from home when she wants. The budget for the department she runs has swollen to $8,000,000.
And it’s time to get the DEI department to give us straight answers.
In a message to Precinct 3 Commissioner Tom Ramsey, Thornton claimed they did monitor the M/WBE program with site visits. The only contractors the DEEO monitors are in the M/WBE program.
Fourteen days after our first request for DEEO site visits, the department posted a picture on Facebook saying, “For the first time,” they had a fleet vehicle for site visits.
It was almost as like they finally realized that someone was actually checking up to make sure they were doing their jobs.
Look at this document of all the remote and hybrid workers at the DEEO.
40 hours, 40 hours, 40 hours, these are salaried positions.
No one knows where they were on their remote days.
And this is nice:
The Houston Business Journal awarded Harris County’s DEEO the 2025 Outstanding Diverse Organization of the Year. Congratulations are in order.
But we’re going to blow you away as we disclose more waste in Harris County government.
Keep your tips coming in, they are fascinating.
And when it comes to the DEEO, judging by its empty calendar on the county website, our job is easy.
There was nothing on the calendar in January, February, one event in March, lots of nothing for April and May.
That’s embarrassing.
Keep up with us on social media:
