Santa Fe faced with having to raise police pay
A$4,500 incentive bonus to stay on the job for just six months sounds like a pretty good deal, and the Santa Fe Police Officers Association accepted it in a vote earlier this month.
The head of the police union initially called the mayor’s offer a “slap in the face” and said officers hadn’t had a raise in 12 years. The first comment seemed like an extreme description for a pretty nice bonus for a half-year’s work, with no commitment required of officers beyond the six months, and the second apparently isn’t true.
City Hall says all city workers, including officers, got 2 percent cost-of-living raises in 2017 and 2018, and the current city contract gives police raises for each year of added experience. Those are raises; not big money, maybe, but raises nonetheless. Not everyone gets one every year.
But the rhetoric is being dialed down now as the officers union and city management head into a new round of collective bargaining. And there are real pay issues to consider.
Albuquerque, as part of its attack on a major crime problem, has raised police pay and is aggressively recruiting officers from other cities. Santa Fe lost 10 or 11 officers to Albuquerque in 2018 — not a vast number, but enough to get the attention of a police chief or mayor.
As of a couple of weeks ago, Santa Fe had 26 vacancies in a police department budgeted for 177 law enforcement positions. That number of open spots isn’t comforting, but a city spokesman says having more than 20 vacancies is not so unusual. City Hall also noted that the vacancy rate was affected last year by the firing of five officers for reasons not disclosed. That is unusual — five is as many terminations in one year as had taken place in the previous five years.
In any case, the dollars involved in this discussion are probably predictive of more voluntary police departures to Albuquerque and of making it more difficult for Santa Fe to attract the best police candidates. The retention bonuses offered up by Mayor Alan Webber are a temporary, $600,000 effort to calm the waters and then figure out how to move forward.
Starting pay is a major issue. A newbie officer in Santa Fe makes $19.11 an hour, or $39,750 a year. In Albuquerque now, the starting rate is $29/hour, or $60,300 a year. There is not much argument over where a good recruit would go when faced with that pay differential. Albuquerque also has longevity bonuses. Even if pay rates in the Duke City and the City Different even out somewhat after several years of police service, the starting pay disparity is so substantial it seems insurmountable.
SFPD now is offering a $1,000 hiring bonus to new cadets and $3,000 to “lateral” officers — from other police agencies — who join SFPD. Lateral officers also receive 160 hours of leave.
But it’s clear that Santa Fe is going to have to come up with more in a police job market where Albuquerque has made itself the dominant force.
Santa Fe’s fallback argument of touting “quality of life” generally doesn’t seem to work with police officers. Housing costs in Santa Fe are an issue. Many Santa Fe officers already live in Rio Rancho or other parts of greater Albuquerque with the use of Santa Fe police cars and taxpayer-paid gas for their commutes. The cars and free gas are a significant employment benefit that, like huge amounts of police overtime pay, have become institutionalized to the point they can probably never be taken away.
So it looks like Santa Fe, like it or not, is going to have to come up with more bucks, and probably soon, to ensure that it can keep a police department that’s properly staffed with well-qualified officers. Santa Fe may not be able to match Albuquerque’s starting pay, but it needs to find a way to be competitive.
In 2006, the City Council approved a rare city government property tax increase to boost police salaries and provide hiring bonuses. As has been noted in this space before, a combination of school and county government increases already have hiked the property tax rate in Santa Fe by 20 percent over just the past few years. There are a couple of other “revenue enhancement” options out there.
Fixing this situation will be a tough task for the mayor and the council, who may have to make some difficult decisions about spending priorities. Their first goal should be ensuring city operations are running as efficiently as possible and scouring City Hall for existing dollars to help boost officer pay.