Houston Chronicle columnist Rick Casey takes issue this morning with our Texas Watchdog story from Thursday about J. Marcus Hill, the No. 2 man in the Harris County attorney's office whose moonlighting posed a potential conflict of interest.

Specifically, he takes issue with our claim that Hill announced his resignation as Texas Watchdog prepared to publish a story about Hill's outside work.

We want to offer our readers a look at the sequence of events that led to the publication of our story. First, here's what Casey reported today:

Casey says that after our Thursday story, he was given a copy of a hand-written resignation letter from Hill, confirmed by County Attorney Vince Ryan, dated "either Oct. 2 or Oct. 5."

I thought I would be here for 90 days but liked working with you so much I have stayed 3.5x as long," the note says. "Accordingly, I will resign on November 4, 2009.

Texas Watchdog began asking questions about the issue of moonlighting county attorneys -- and Hill in particular -- in mid-September. Indeed, folks who attended the Sept. 29 Harris County Commissioners Court meeting might remember meeting our staffer Steve Miller, who wrote the story about J. Marcus Hill. Steve was poking around about the moonlighting issue that day.

Over the following couple days, Miller continued to ask about Hill, including making phone calls to sources and county officials, as well as examining court files pertaining to Hill's work. This would have been in the days just before Oct. 2 or Oct. 5. The reporting was aggressive, and we have little doubt that word of our work had reached the county attorney's office.

We interviewed Hill for Thursday's story twice -- once last week and once again on Wednesday, after we had been told by a third party that he was resigning.

One point of contention we have with Rick Casey's writeup: The first conversation we had with Hill didn't originate with us contacting him. Hill contacted us.

Hill's first call to Texas Watchdog came in response to a message we left with Terry O'Rourke as part of our investigation. O'Rourke is the special counsel in the Harris County Attorney's Office. During that initial interview with Hill, we spoke at length about his outside work -- and Hill mentioned nothing about having submitted his resignation.

We also called Hill's boss, County Attorney Vince Ryan, twice in the past week. He returned one call and left a voicemail asking us for specifics of what we were looking into; we responded with specifics but didn't hear back from him after that second call.

Instead, we were told of Hill's "resignation" through a source.

When we called Hill, he confirmed he was stepping down and told Miller about his daughter going to NYU -- which we published, along with a detailed account of his extra-curricular work.

Finally, we do appreciate Rick Casey for writing about these conflicts of interest that loom regarding moonlighting Harris County attorneys. This issue has been around for some time but has, until Texas Watchdog's report and Rick Casey's column, gone uncovered.