City mum on status of $266K equal pay report
Firm was paid six figures to do study on salaries and gender inequities; city refuses to release information
Citing attorney-client privilege, the city of Santa Fe is refusing to say whether an outside firm that received a six-figure contract calling for it to provide a report on gender inequities in regard to employee pay actually produced the report.
“The city has paid for and received the review provided by Springsted, Inc. and considers the contract fulfilled,” city spokeswoman Lilia Chacon said in an email to The New Mexican on Wednesday.
“However, because the contractor provided the report to the city attorney pursuant to her representation of the city, the city cannot comment any further about the study. It is subject to client-lawyer confidentiality,” she wrote.
Springsted, which conducted a classification and compensation study for the city under a nearly $266,500 contract, was required to generate, among other things, a report on whether female employees in city government earned the same pay as their male counterparts.
District 1 City Councilwoman Renee Villarreal said last week that Springsted failed to produce the report. “I don’t know why, but it didn’t get done,” she said.
“I’m going to keep pushing for that, and I don’t know if we can hold them accountable on that contract or if there’s something else that we need to do internally,” added Villarreal, who is running unopposed in the Nov. 5 municipal election. “But I think to have an analysis of how we’re doing is important because if we’re asking other [employers] to do that, we need to also do that ourselves internally and make sure that we are talking the talk, walking the walk.”
A spokeswoman for the advisory, tax and assurance firm Baker Tilly Virchow Krause, LLP, which acquired Springsted in January to form a municipal advisory practice, declined to comment. “It is Baker Tilly’s policy not to comment on matters involving our clients,” spokeswoman Nicole Berkeland wrote in an email Monday.
In a brief interview earlier this week, Mayor Alan Webber said he didn’t know whether Springsted had produced the gender inequity report as part of the larger classification and compensation study.
Springsted’s work was the subject of an informational presentation at Monday’s Finance Committee meeting.
City Councilor Roman “Tiger” Abeyta, who chairs the committee, asked the presenter, Ashley Barela, who is the city’s assistant human resources director, whether the
report on gender inequities had been completed. Barela said she believed the firm had “evaluated” the subject but that she had not personally seen a report. Barela said Human Resources Director Bernadette Salazar, who did not attend the meeting, “would be able to give a much broader explanation.”
Salazar, who took over the city’s Human Resources Department after the city inked the contract, did not return a message seeking comment late Wednesday.
The classification and compensation study conducted by Springsted is the third of its type in at least the last 14 years.
“This was the first class and comp study that we actually implemented,” Barela told the Finance Committee.
Among the study’s finding was that city pay is competitive with the market overall but that some positions lag behind.
“If we looked at just the classifications that were really below market value and we didn’t look at all of our classifications, those that were determined to be under market value, at times, they were 11 percent lower than the market average pay for some of those positions,” she said.
As a result, the city brought “everyone who was below the minimum of their new classification range up to the minimum of that position” during last year’s budget process, Barela said.
“It cost the city approximately $1.5 million to bring those employees up to the minimum of their range and that was approximately 0.45 percent of the city’s annual budget,” she said.