Saying he wants to “set the record straight,” Gary Gillen, who resigned recently as Fort Bend County GOP chairman, on Monday addressed party financial issues about which he said he believes “people have been misled.”

One such issue involves reimbursement checks Gillen wrote to would-be advertisers in the county Republican Party’s October newsletter, which was printed but not mailed. The other involves payment to the printer for the newsletter itself.

In a Saturday column, FortBendNow reported that Gillen said he’d reimbursed those who paid for ads in the publication, however, party activist Rick Miller, who has announced he’s running for county GOP party chairman, said he never was reimbursed for his full-page, $1,200 ad. The column questioned whether the lack of reimbursement was a coincidence.

After the column appeared, recently resigned county GOP treasurer Richard McCarter said Miller wasn’t reimbursed for his full-page ad because of an email Miller’s his campaign manager, Lynda Mixon, sent to McCarter on Oct. 23.

“I accidentally wrote the check for Rick Miller’s purchase on an account that I closed,” Mixon’s email said. “Will you please tear that check up and I will send you a new one.”

McCarter said the party didn’t receive a replacement check, and thus didn’t write a reimbursement check for $1,200 to Miller.

But Miller and Mixon said the check referred to in the email was a $260 check for items Miller purchased at an auction during a GOP picnic, not the $1,200 check for the newsletter ad. Miller said his $1,200 check was written to the GOP on Oct. 7 and then mailed. Mixon said bank records show it was deposited in the party’s account on Oct. 24.

Gillen said on Monday that until being informed of the $260 check by a reporter, he and McCarter had been unaware that Mixon was not referring to Miller’s $1,200 check.

“We were in the process of working through these advertiser checks” and Mixon’s email “came in right as we were trying to work through the ad statements. We were put in the position of feeling it was the appropriate thing to do.”

Gillen said he and McCarter thought Mixon’s email meant that the $1,200 check was “going to bounce,” so they decided not to reimburse money for a check that couldn’t be deposited.

Now with the realization that Mixon was referring to a different check, Gillen said he and McCarter acted in good faith. He said the county party’s most recent bank statement hadn’t yet arrived by the time the two resigned their party positions, and they thought Mixon was rererring to the $1,200 check.

“I should have been more clear in my email, and should’ve been more explicit,” Mixon said Monday.

She said she had initially set up two bank accounts for Miller’s campaign, to keep separate records on any corporate contributions to the campaign. But then she learned that the county party chairman can’t accept corporate contributions, so she closed one of the accounts. Later, she said, she accidentally took the wrong checkbook with her, and wound up writing the $260 check on the wrong account.

But Mixon noted that bank records showed Miller’s $1,200 check “cleared the bank Oct. 25, and my email was sent on Oct. 23,” so McCarter “had either deposited the check real quick or he had already deposited it” before she wrote her email.

Gillen said Miller still will receive his money once the county party acts to select a replacement chairman, as the money is in the party account.

Gillen said he still is facing some of the same difficulties after his resignation that he faced from critics while he was party chairman.
For example, he said he’s still hearing criticism over the way payment to the party newsletter’s printer was handled.

Gillen noted that Andre McDonald, chairman of the county GOP’s communications committee, stated recently that Gillen should have gone to the party’s executive committee for permission before paying the printer the $7,500 he was owed.

Gillen also produced an Oct. 15 email in which McDonald tells the printer that the executive committee “has authorized your payment” and that Gillen and McCarter were informed “so that they would have the check ready when required.”

McDonald, Gillen said, “is trying to have it both ways” and complained that payment for the printer hadn’t arrived, then complained that Gillen’s payment to the printer was unauthorized.

“We’ve been honest and tried to tell the truth, and these people haven’t. And now after we resigned, they’re still attacking us,” he said.