Ex-manager OK’d raises despite own concerns
Email shows Snyder worried about scope, costs of hike
Then-City Manager Brian Snyder raised concerns in February about the cost and consequences of awarding only a select group of city employees doubledigit pay increases — a contentious issue that ultimately led to his forced resignation last week.
“I think it’s a lot of people,” Snyder wrote in a Feb. 1 email after Deputy City Manager Renée Martínez first requested the temporary pay increases, which she initially said would cost $300,000. “A plan for responding to those not on the list needs to be developed.”
Such a plan never fully unfolded, and Mayor Alan Webber later said that was “one of the process failures that created
this controversy.”
Despite Snyder’s own concerns, he quietly signed off on the raises on the eve of Webber’s inauguration, setting off a chain of events that ultimately cost him his job as city manager and pushed him back to an old position at the water utility.
The February email from Snyder to Martínez is one of dozens The New Mexican obtained under an open-records request for documents related to the temporary pay increases.
The mayor abruptly halted the pay increases late Friday amid revelations that city executives had violated a 1992 policy on incentive pay that required the City Council to approve the raises.
Though Snyder was concerned about the large number of employees getting temporary raises, more names were added in the following weeks, bumping up the cost to nearly $400,000 — about $100,000 more than Martínez’s initial estimate.
“A preliminary estimate provide [sic] to the deputy city manager by the Finance Division did not include 11 employees who were assigned to the project after that early estimate,” city spokesman Matt Ross said Wednesday via email.
Designed to last only one year, the raises angered other city employees who say they, too, are deserving of more money, as well as taxpayers who questioned the move following the election of a mayor who campaigned as a change agent.
“Inside City Hall it has left room for doubt, suspicion, and rumor to take root,” Webber wrote in a report he issued in response to the growing controversy surrounding the raises. “Outside City Hall, it has allowed Santa Feans to see this as another example of ‘business as usual’ in the way the city operates.”
Webber initially defended the raises, saying they were a necessary component of a multimillion-dollar computer modernization project for employees who had taken on extra responsibilities to make sure the project was successful.
“On Monday, April 10th, I got to the bottom of the decision on the temporary pay raises,” Webber proclaimed in his report, which failed to examine the policy that required the city Finance Committee to approve the raises before a vote by the full City Council.
It was only after recently elected Councilor JoAnne Vigil Coppler, a former city human resources director, raised concerns about the raises and a potential policy violation that Webber reviewed the policy.
Two employees were especially hurt by the city’s handling of the issue, according to internal city documents.
The city initially provided a list of 39 employees who received raises of 10 percent or 15 percent. But the city’s list was wrong. Only 37 employees received raises.
The two employees whose names were erroneously listed by the city and published in the newspaper — Carlos Ramirez and Debbie Rouse — were “both understandably very upset,” their boss, Barbara Boltrek of the city’s Office of Risk and Safety, wrote in an email to Snyder, Martínez and former Finance Director Adam Johnson on April 7 — the day the story about the city releasing the list of employees who got raises appeared in print.
Martínez replied: “We made that change and I had not updated the spreadsheet.”
But Boltrek, who also said the list gave an inaccurate base salary for Ramirez, didn’t seem to be satisfied with the response.
“I do not understand how a spreadsheet that had not been updated was released as a public record,” Boltrek wrote the following Monday in an email that she also sent to the mayor and his chief of staff, Jarel LaPan Hill.
“It is inconceivable to me that this document was submitted to The New Mexican without being ‘updated,’ ” Boltrek concluded in the email. “I am not trying to be antagonistic, but this seems a ridiculous error to have made.”
The mayor delved into the matter days after the story broke. He was galvanized, at least in part, by an editorial in The New Mexican that called for the mayor “to get into the details,” according to city emails.
“If you haven’t read it, please do,” Webber wrote in an April 8 email to Hill, Danila Zidovsky, who was Webber’s mayoral campaign communications director and is now working voluntarily as his transition director at City Hall, and Neri Holguin, an Albuquerque-based political strategist who was Webber’s campaign manager.
“I think it’s a good statement of the situation,” Webber wrote, “and what I do, in fact, need to do.”
Webber asked how the new administration could get a “quick assessment of the actual facts.”
“There’s obviously another set of issues, having to do with ‘business as usual’ and the violation of trust,” Webber added. “This particular incident touches all the bases that make people angry and critical of the way government operates: Public salaries, which are always a touchy subject at any level of government; things being done in secret or without review or disclosure; timing that suggests an attempt to get something done before there could be oversight; the possibility of favoritism; unknown new duties or responsibilities in exchange for the extra money; and a lot of other unanswered questions about where the money came from, how much money, and so on.”