GALVESTON — The city is disputing a quarter of the $1.76 million bill it got from the San Luis Hotel after Hurricane Ike.

City officials took over the luxury resort property Sept. 12, taking rooms for all the city employees who stayed on the island during the storm.

After 19 days, the city racked up a bill for 7,935 room nights and 51,211 meals.

The food costs are at the heart of the disagreement between the city and the hotel, city Finance Director Jeff Miller said.

Based on the number of meals, which cost $16.33 each, it appears the city was charged twice for food that should have been included in the room rates, Miller said.

The San Luis billed the city for 25,297 extra meals. Most of them were billed three at a time, at a daily rate of $40.83. But 703 meals were charged individually at $16.33 each.

All of the additional meals cost $348,256.

Although everyone who ate at the hotel had to sign a sheet before getting a meal, including members of the media and the public who stayed there during the storm, Miller said the city’s bill probably included some meals the city shouldn’t be paying for.

The San Luis never billed The Daily News for meals its reporters and photographers ate during the three days they spent at the hotel, for example.

The city also is disputing an $18,800 rental charge for meeting rooms, which should have been included in the city’s agreement to stay at the hotel during the storm, Miller said.

The San Luis staff is reviewing the bill and hope to have any questions resolved shortly, said Steve Greenberg, a spokesman for Landry’s Restaurants, which manages the hotel.

Although the city has only paid the San Luis $1.3 million so far, officials sent the entire bill to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for reimbursement.

The agency should cover all of the charges, except for the time city employees spent in the hotel before the storm. Those two days will only be reimbursed at 75 percent, Miller said.

On Sept. 11, a day before Ike made landfall, the city had 135 rooms at the San Luis. By Sept. 15, the city was taking up 462 rooms, divided between the San Luis, the Hilton and the Holiday Inn, which are all Landry’s properties.

By Sept. 28, the last night the city paid to stay at the hotels, its staffers took up 550 rooms.

Some staff members shared rooms while others had a room to themselves and had family members staying with them.

At one point, Miller shared a room with four members of the information technology department.

Paula Ozymy, special assistant to City Manager Steve LeBlanc, said the city didn’t have a policy about who shared a room and who got their own space.

Ozymy assigned each department a block of rooms, and the department managers made the individual room assignments, she said.

The city did not keep a detailed list of which staff members were in each room, Ozymy said.

Keeping all of the rooms organized was a little crazy because no one had access to computers at first, Ozymy said.

But given the technical limitations at the time, Ozymy said she wasn’t sure how the city could have organized the rooms any differently.

But not all of the rooms included on the city’s bill were occupied by city employees, Miller said.

The city also paid for rooms occupied by employees from the Galveston Independent School District, the Port of Galveston and the University of Texas Medical Branch.

City officials decided it would be easier to submit all of the charges in one bill to the federal government for reimbursement, rather than have each entity submit a separate bill, Miller said.

As long as the charges are reimbursed by the federal government, it doesn’t really matter who paid for them up front, Miller said.