Highest-paid S.F. County job is vacant

Last psychiatrist in position at jail made $135 per hour

Santa Fe County’s highest-paid employee has stepped down.

She wasn’t the county manager or county attorney. She wasn’t the sheriff.

Dr. Anne Ortiz was the psychiatrist at the Santa Fe County jail.

She had served as an inmate psychiatrist for about a year before leaving to pursue other opportunities, the jail warden said.

According to her contract, Ortiz was hired in mid-July 2017 at a salary of $135 an hour, or about $280,000 a year.

Now, the jail is looking for her replacement.

According to a job announcement posted Aug. 22, the jail psychiatrist evaluates inmates at the county’s adult

detention center and youth detention facility. Duties also include prescribing treatment for mental health issues, helping to study major inmate health problems and working with a team of medical and social services professionals to create individual treatment plans.

While the jail looks for a new psychiatrist, Warden Derek Williams said, the facility’s team of behavioral health therapists and a medical doctor are working together to address inmates’ psychiatric needs.

Asked whether the county intends to pay Ortiz’s replacement the same salary, Williams said that will depend on the county budget and the experience of the new hire.

Ortiz’s salary, according to the county website, was more than twice as much as Williams’, at $106,000 a year, and almost $100,000 more than the county manager’s salary of $185,000 a year.

The high range of pay is not all that unusual for a jail psychiatrist, according to online job postings. A posting for a jail psychiatrist in Santa Rosa, Calif., for example, advertises pay of $400,000-plus a year.

The job posting for the local jail psychiatrist position closes Thursday, according to the Santa Fe County website.

Reached by phone, Ortiz declined to be interviewed. In an interview earlier this year, Ortiz said jails are the No. 1 caretaker of the mentally ill across the country.

A 2016 report from the Treatment Advocacy Center estimated that at least 20 percent of jail inmates have serious mental illnesses. Ortiz estimated in an interview this spring that at any given time at least a third of the Santa Fe County jail’s inmates had persistent mental health issues. The maximum capacity of the county jail is over 600.

During Ortiz’s time at the jail, Williams said the jail implemented a residential drug treatment program called Matrix, which includes intensive therapy and education for inmates looking to combat addiction. The pilot Matrix group was slated to start with a dozen participants, Ortiz said this spring.

About six inmates recently graduated from the first iteration of that program, Williams said. “They all maintained sobriety throughout the duration of that program.”

This spring, the jail also started offering a medication called Naltrexone to help inmates with opioid dependence overcome addiction.

Under Ortiz, the jail did not provide other types of medication-based

treatments for inmates with opioid addiction, such as the drugs methadone and buprenorphine, which are offered by community clinics and only a handful of jails across the country.

One of the reasons for that, Ortiz said this spring, points to the difficulty of prescribing any drug in a jail setting: diversion.

Jail officials worried that introducing drugs with dangerous or addictive qualities could end in inmates trying to smuggle or abuse the drugs. Ortiz faced the same struggle with psychotropic medications used to treat mental and behavioral illness, and even nonprescription drugs.

“We have to police ibuprofen,” Ortiz said.

Ortiz’s predecessor had the same frustrations. Dr. Luigi Dulanto, resigned as the jail psychiatrist in September 2016, according to an article in the Santa Fe Reporter.

“Many inmates want to get high on the medication I was prescribing,” the doctor told the Reporter. “It was very upsetting.”