HOUSTON -- Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal recently approved an $11,000-a-year raise for his secretary to whom he had sent a series of romantic e-mails, according to a published report.

The raise for Kerry Stevens, the embattled prosecutor’s executive assistant and former lover, took effect Saturday, according to county payroll records reviewed by the Houston Chronicle. The raise boosts Stevens’ salary from about $78,000 per year to about $89,500, the newspaper reported in Thursday’s editions.

A committee of top supervisors in the district attorney’s office usually recommends merit raises to Rosenthal for approval or adjustment. However, Rosenthal was solely responsible for Stevens’ raise, said Bert Graham, his first assistant district attorney.

Graham is one of the supervisors on the committee that recommends merit raises. He told the Chronicle that Rosenthal, alone, is responsible for the salaries of executive assistant and other top-echelon officials in his department.

“We left that to Chuck. She works for him,” Graham told the Chronicle.

Rosenthal declined to comment, the Chronicle reported. A call to his office from The Associated Press on Thursday was not answered.

Payroll records show that many of Rosenthal’s support staff saw salary ceilings increase 12 percent to 15 percent. Graham said the last increase in pay ceilings came about 10 years ago.

Harris County commissioners approved the salary increases on Dec. 18. Joe Stinebaker, spokesman for County Judge Ed Emmett, said commissioners usually follow recommendations of the county’s elected officials.

The e-mails were among a batch of racially and sexually charged electronic messages sent or received with Rosenthal’s county e-mail account. Those messages were briefly and mistakenly disclosed in a federal civil rights lawsuit against the Harris County Sheriff’s Department.

The messages led to Rosenthal’s abandonment, under Republican Party pressure, of his GOP re-election campaign and brought calls for his resignation.

Rosenthal has said that he had an affair with Stevens in the 1980s when he was married to his first wife, but the relationship did not lead to his divorce. He has said he told his current wife about the affair before hiring Stevens when he took office in 2000.

Rosenthal also used his county e-mail account to plan his now-aborted re-election campaign. Such messages may violate Texas laws barring the use government property for political activity, and the Texas Attorney General’s Office has begun investigating.