More than salary at stake under new mayoral system
Charter change puts office in charge of policymaking and the executive branch
When the next mayor of Santa Fe is sworn into office after the March 2018 municipal election, he or she will no longer be just a part-time policymaker and ceremonial figurehead with only one vote on the nine-member governing body.
Under a charter change approved by voters a little over three years ago, the position of mayor will become a fulltime chief executive with a higher salary and the power to fire three of the top executives at City Hall.
But other than a fatter paycheck and the authority to fire the city manager, city attorney and city clerk, what else will be different from the existing mayor-council form of government, in which an unelected city manager oversees the day-to-day operations?
“The answer is not that much,” said former city councilor Karen Heldmeyer, one of only a handful of people who regularly attended meetings of a Charter Review Commission that in 2013 recommended the switch to a fulltime mayor.
“But it’s going to be more transparent,” she said in an interview Friday. “The mayor will be the CEO, and decisions can’t be sloughed off onto some staff member.”
“Under the current system,” Heldmeyer said, “the mayor would have to get buy-in from the City Council to fire [the city manager], and under the new system, the mayor would not. That’s probably the biggest real difference. But if people think that we haven’t had strong mayors, they haven’t been paying attention. I would include the last several mayors.”
Although it’s still about a year away, the move to a full-time mayor has renewed discussion and debate about the change as an Independent Salary Commission gets ready to decide Wednesday how much the mayor should be paid. Some critics say the change will give the mayor too much power. An expert on strong-mayor governments said the move likely will create more stability, but also will leave the mayor in charge of two branches of government — the policymaking body and the executive branch.
The salary commission, which will meet at 6:30 p.m. at City Hall, 200 Lincoln Ave., is inviting the public to weigh in before it makes a final decision.
The seven-member volunteer commission has faced harsh criticism for considering a salary range of $145,000 to $175,000 a year for the mayor because a ballot question approved by voters in 2014 stated that the initial salary for the full-time mayor would be $74,000 until such a commission was created and set the salary.
The salary range proposed by the commission doesn’t include benefits, which would add about 40 percent to the total compensation package. If the commission sets the annual salary at $175,000, for example, the total compensation would be about $245,000 a year.
Currently, Santa Fe’s part-time mayor, as well as city councilors, are paid about $29,500 a year.
“The salary for the mayor that has been recommended by the salary commission is outrageous for a city the size of Santa Fe where there is a full-time city manager,” former city councilor Steven Farber wrote in an email Thursday night. Farber, an attorney, served on the Charter Review Commission that recommended a full-time mayor and opposed the change.
Lynette Trujillo, the city’s human resources director, said the next mayor will not receive vacation pay or sick leave.
“As for the job description, currently it is outlined in the charter,” she said, referring to the city’s version of the U.S. Constitution.
The city charter states that the powers and duties of the mayor include exercising “administrative control and supervision over the city manager, city attorney and city clerk,” and having the “sole authority” to remove them.
The mayor also will represent the city in intergovernmental relationships, “work with city personnel and timely prepare an annual budget and proposed spending priority for review and approval by the finance committee and the governing body,” and “propose programs and policies to the governing body,” the charter states.
When the Charter Review Commission proposed a full-time mayor, Farber wrote a “minority report” at the time strongly objecting. “This deeply flawed proposal radically restructures City of Santa Fe government,” Farber wrote. “It is no exaggeration to state that the potential for an autocrat, an autocratic form of government, and political patronage are made possible through the proposed consolidation of such enormous power in the office of the mayor.”
But Adrian Kwiatkowski, president of the San Diego-based Strong Mayor-Council Institute, which conducts research and provides consultation on mayorcouncil forms of government, said the move actually could have the opposite effect.
“The power has transferred from the City Council members directly to the voters through the mayor,” he said. “It’s cleaner. It’s more democratic. It’s not autocratic. It’s democratic because previously you had a system that was bureaucratic.”
In Santa Fe, though, the switch could have its challenges, said Kwiatkowski, who recommends a community discussion in the future about removing the mayor from the City Council and giving the mayor veto authority over legislation and budgetary matters.
“With the mayor having executive authority but also legislative authority [by continuing to serve on the City Council], it seems that it’s not as clean of a separation of powers as it should be,” he said.
“The mayor now is basically head of both branches of government,” Kwiatkowski said. “It’s not an anomaly. There are lot of cities that have that structure, both large and small, but it’s not optimum.”
Kwiatkowski also said voters will have to pick the right candidate to fill the job.
“Be careful who you elect when you get them, as we’re seeing on the national level,” he said.
When the Charter Review Commission recommended the switch, a driving reason was the need for more stability, as Santa Fe had gone through 11 city managers during the tenure of three mayors.
“Eleven city managers for the last three mayors is per se dysfunctional and a disservice to the citizens of Santa Fe,” former New Mexico Supreme Court Justice Patricio Serna, chairman of the Charter Review Commission, said at the time. “Something needs to be done to alleviate the situation, so I believe this is a start.”
Serna said Friday that commission members were concerned about the lack of consistency and stability and felt that the city government, which now has a total operating budget of about $399 million and about 1,400 employees, needed a full-time chief executive at the helm.
Kwiatkowski agreed that the move to a full-time mayor will bring the city stability.
Currently, he said, the city manager has nine bosses on the City Council and must constantly ensure he has the approval of at least five of them to maintain his job security, a situation that could leave the employee “playing the game of pitting the bosses against each other,” he said. “Now, the city manager will have one boss. It’ll create stability, and it will create accountability for performance because who is the mayor going to blame? The buck is going to stop at the mayor’s desk.”
Farber said the full-time mayor proposal presented to voters wasn’t clear, and he believes the ballot question was “misleading about the scope and intent of the full-time mayor issue.”
“It is also my opinion that the full-time mayor proposal that was summarized in an information packet from the city and made available to the voters at the voting sites was misleading and incomplete,” he added. “It is no surprise to me that many people feel that they did not have full information at the time of the vote.”
The salary issue has drawn such criticisms. Residents say they thought they were approving a $74,000 salary for the mayor when they voted in favor of the charter change.
Heldmeyer, who voted against the charter change, said she believes the $74,000 salary — which members of the Independent Salary Commission have called a “placeholder” — was included in the ballot language to be “deliberately deceiving.”
“What was discussed in the charter commission meetings was certainly a lot more money than $74,000,” she said. “There were discussions of things like, ‘Well, if the mayor is the CEO, which is what the charter says, is it really fair that the mayor gets less than the city manager?’ … It’s not like they were pulling out specific amounts of money, but you could tell where it was headed, given the comments.”
Serna said the Charter Review Commission didn’t recommend a $74,000 placeholder. “That was added by the City Council,” he said.
Still, Serna said, the ballot question clearly specified that an independent commission would set the salary.
“It’s right there in black-andwhite, the first paragraph of the question for Charter Amendment 9,” he said. “If you read the question before you vote, I think it’s pretty clear to me that the $74,000 is only until the salary commission is established by ordinance, and they set the mayor’s salary.”
But Serna doesn’t believe the Independent Salary Commission will set a range anywhere near $175,000 a year.
“That salary range, $145,000 to $175,000, everybody is in agreement that that’s kind of pie in the sky,” he said. “I think that this commission will be reasonable.”
Kwiatkowski said the salary of the mayor always becomes a contentious issue for a city that changes its governance.
“For some reason, when you include the elected official element, who people feel should be some sort of a do-gooder serving the community, it becomes a bone of contention,” he said.
“People just need to ask themselves, ‘Would they take that job for less than $140,000 and deal with all the problems?’ The voters themselves need to ask, ‘Would you want to be mayor and not get paid and field all of the headaches?’ We all know the answer to that. The answer is no.”