Expecting surplus, city looks to increase spending
$399M budget proposal has money for roads, parks, jobs
Judging by city budget proposals, Santa Fe residents might expect smoother streets and fewer weeds in public parks and traffic medians during the fiscal year that begins July 1.
A year after tight finances forced City Hall to slash some services, raise fees and shrink its workforce to help close a $15 million deficit, policymakers are looking to increase spending, without pressure to raise new revenue or shift resources to cover expansion requests.
Thanks to a stronger economy and fiscal discipline, city finance officials this time project a surplus of more than $15 million in the overall operating budget.
“We are still seeing patterns in gross receipts tax that would indicate a long-term trend of a 2 percent growth rate,” Finance Director Adam Johnson told the mayor and a majority of city councilors on Tuesday, referring to city government’s primary source of money. “It’s staff ’s recommendation that it’s the responsible thing to do to budget the revenue that is appearing to be coming in on a recurring basis and deploy that revenue to the services for the city of Santa Fe.”
The operating budget proposed by City Manager Brian Snyder includes $3.1 million in expansions, including $300,000 for on-call street repair and maintenance, and $200,000 to hire 14 seasonal workers to “effectively manage” parks and medians that were overgrown with weeds last year.
Snyder’s relatively robust $399 million overall spending blueprint is about 3 percent bigger than the current year’s. The $89.5 million general fund, which pays for day-to-day operations such as police and fire services, would be about 7 percent larger.
The city Finance Committee, which includes a majority of the eight city councilors, is holding a series of hearings this week before making a final recommendation to the full governing body on a document that reflects their priorities.
The city manager’s proposal doesn’t include pay raises, setting up what could be a debate among councilors and Mayor Javier Gonzales, who called for a 5 percent
across-the-board pay increase for city employees in his annual State of the City address last month. That would add about $4.1 million to annual payroll costs.
During the first day of budget hearings Tuesday, Snyder and Johnson said top administrators purposely left it for elected decision-makers to wade in on the issue of raises for the city’s approximately 1,500 employees.
“I’m open for a conversation for how that looks and feels,” Snyder said.
Councilor Carmichael Dominguez, who chairs the Finance Committee, said that although the mayor has identified a 5 percent raise for all employees as a goal, it is up to the governing body to decide “what the pay raise may or may not be.”
“We’re going to do the best that we can to make sure that employees get a pay raise,” Dominguez said at the outset of budget deliberations. “I think that’s one of the priorities that has been publicly stated by this Finance Committee. We’ll see how things go from there.”
In an interview, Gonzales said of the eight-member council, “I hope they’ll do the 5 percent, but I certainly respect this process of the governing board determining what would be appropriate, given where we’re at. I’ll continue to advocate for it, but this is a budget process where those conversations will play out, and they’re doing the right thing by making sure that they’re able to methodically move through the budget and then make some determinations on what that raise would look like.”
Other expansions proposed by the city manager include $1.1 million for a
preventive medical response program under the city’s relatively new Mobile Integrated Health Office, watershed fire management efforts, and firefighter cadet training to provide service to an area the city annexed on Santa Fe’s southwest side.
Johnson, who joined the city as budget director in February 2016 and replaced Finance Director Oscar Rodriguez when he left in October, said the budget situations last year and this year are like “night and day.”
“We’re in a fortunate position to be able to talk about revenue surpluses,” he said, “and proactively going after the challenges and mandates that we have an obligation to fund.”