Council OKs $336M budget with police, fire bumps
City employees slated to receive 2% raises as leaders continue to work on organizational chart
Santa Fe city officials on Wednesday night approved a $335 million operating budget for the next fiscal year that includes increases for the police and fire departments and $3.2 million in surplus revenue.
City staff have described the budget as generally flat. The police department will see a 10 percent increase over the current fiscal year and the fire department roughly 6 percent, the bulk of which will go toward wages and benefits. Most other departments, meanwhile, will see a slight year-overyear decrease in their budgets in the fiscal year that begins in July.
Staff said that reflects a ground-up budget construction process that better captures the actual funding needs of each department.
The Parks and Recreation Department, for instance, will see a 4 percent decrease from last year but has experienced “substantial” growth over the past five years, an average of 4 percent annually, said Brad Fluetsch, the city’s financial planning and reporting officer.
“You really get down to the services it’s your goal to provide,” said Fluetsch, referring to the “zero-based” budgeting approach officials used. Each department also included “results-based accountability” benchmarks by which their performance will be measured.
“Managerial discipline has begun to take shape,” Mayor Alan Webber said.
City staff, councilors and Webber,
elected in the middle of budget preparations, scraped through the 2019 budget cycle despite the departure of the two administrative officials most directly involved in the financial framework: former Finance Director Adam Johnson, who resigned to take a position at St. John’s College, and former City Manager Brian Snyder, who resigned as part of the fallout of a pay raise debacle.
The budget hearings, coming on the heels of the March mayoral election, were occasionally rough: Staff, many of whom were serving in their roles on an interim basis amid an ongoing administrative changeover, sometimes appeared unprepared before city councilors, and governing body discussions frequently veered into the still-fluid breakdown of mayoral-council power in the city’s new stronger-mayor system.
For all that, councilors on Wednesday credited staff for their efforts. Councilor Mike Harris said the process was “fairly seamless,” calling the result a “prudent budget.”
Webber has called the budget “far from a finished product” and said he intends to review it in six months.
In the meantime, the Webber administration is expected to reshape the city organizational chart as well as make key full-time hires, among them a city manager, city attorney and police chief.
In other words, although the 2019 budget approved Wednesday included an organizational chart, certain positions and divisions might be consolidated, shuffled or axed.
“Just because we have an organization chart doesn’t mean that’s what it’s going to look like in six months or a year from now,” Councilor Roman “Tiger” Abeyta said.
The budget includes a 2 percent across-the-board pay increase for city workers. The raises do not reflect a compensation-and-classification study the city has undertaken with the hope of identifying proper roles and pay grades for workers, interim City Manager Erik Litzenberg said. The study is not yet complete, he said.
Money for an equity pay proposal brought forward by the union that represents hundreds of city workers is “not included in next year’s budget,” said interim City Attorney Geno Zamora, who declined to discuss the item further, saying negotiations are likely to continue.
During public hearings, $200,000 was added to the Finance Department budget to provide for three audits of city financial practices, one of which is a forensic audit. The decision followed a scathing report in the fall that said financial procedures were riven with risks of fraud, waste and abuse.
Webber, in his original budget request, envisioned a beefed-up Mayor’s Office reflecting the mayor’s enhanced authority under the city charter. Part of that was an expanded Constituent Services Office that would be placed under the umbrella of the Mayor’s Office.
Pilar Faulkner, a member of the city Planning Commission, said she viewed the new positions in that proposal as particularly salient. “If we are making decisions on behalf of the community, it’s important to take a proactive stance,” Faulkner said.
Councilors, however, took issue with moving employees under the mayor’s purview without a corresponding increase in resources for the council.
The budget request includes funding for the new positions but does not specify duties and to whom the workers will report. Webber and councilors have said they have agreed to continue those discussions. “It’s a work in progress,” Webber said.