City gives $400K in raises to select workers

City manager OK’d temporary increases for staff involved with software upgrade just before start of Webber’s term

Just days before Santa Fe voters elected a new mayor, city executives quietly devised a plan to give a select group of 39 employees temporary raises of either 10 percent or 15 percent.

The nearly $400,000 in raises went into effect the same day that newly elected Mayor Alan Webber took the oath of office.

The temporary pay increases, from March of this year to next March, were approved single-handedly by City Manager Brian Snyder.

They are going to employees who are implementing the city’s Enterprise Resource Planning and Land Use Modernization Project, which is essentially a software upgrade designed to automate and streamline financial, human resource and land-use processes — an area of technology where the city is sorely behind.

“Waiting [to hand out the raises until a new mayor was elected] was not considered due to the importance of the project to the city,” Deputy City Manager Renée Martínez, who requested the pay increases, said Wednesday.

Martínez said she briefed Webber and his chief of staff, Jarel LaPan Hill, about the project, as well as the temporary raises, after Webber took office.

“I’ve had a chance to sit down with them and explain where we are and what we’re trying to accomplish. They’re very supportive,” she said. “I did also mention that we were giving some temporary pay increases and didn’t receive any concerns about that from them.”

Webber, who was elected March 6 — four days after Martínez requested the temporary raises — said he was unaware of how they were added.

“I’d have to sit down and talk to Renée about it. I have not had that briefing,” Webber said. “… They were working on a budget, largely a budget that was in train, before I became mayor.”

In a subsequent interview, Webber said Martínez “mentioned that she had put together a plan to compensate people who are working their usual jobs and then adding an increment of additional work on top of their day jobs to implement the ERP system and make sure that it was on time and done properly.”

“We didn’t get into the details,” the mayor said.

Webber said an inquiry from The New Mexican prompted him to ask more questions about the temporary raises.

“It turns out — I didn’t know this — that the city is prohibited from incentive pay. By law, I’m told, the city cannot use that language,” he said.

“If we had called it incentive pay, people would probably say, ‘Oh, I get that. They do that in companies and organizations all over the country.’ But we can’t use that language,” he added. “So, in effect, what we’re doing is creating the public sector version of incentive pay to make sure that this absolutely critical function of modernizing and streamlining city government gets done in a costeffective and on-time way.”

Asked whether the city should have waited to propose the raises until a new mayor took office, Webber deflected the question.

“Frankly, since I stepped into the mayor’s office, most of the things I’m looking at are forward looking rather than revisiting decisions that were made before I came into the job,” he said. “It’s easy to second-guess people, but fundamentally, I think we have to make the city move ahead and not spend a lot of time revisiting past decisions.”

Webber said city operations are in desperate need of modernization to end what he called “an old-fashioned approach to running a complex government.”

“We’re still moving paper from station to station,” the mayor said, citing permitting in the land-use office as just one of myriad examples of a slow and antiquated system.

“Only one person at a time can look at the plan. It’s incredibly time-consuming and frustrating, both to permit applicants and to the city employees trying to serve them,” Webber said.

Martínez said city executives wanted to reward employees who are playing critical roles in implementing the nearly $3.7 million modernization project. The employees, she said, are performing their “normal operational duties” while taking on additional tasks related to the modernization project.

“We wanted to recognize that this is a heavy lift for these staff,” she said. “They’re not going to be able to take a lot of vacation this year because you should see this calendar that we have of the activities that are going on every week. Every week has activities, deadlines [and] assignments that are due, and we wanted to let them know this is not normal, but it is so important for the organization that we wanted to recognize that.”

Martínez said money for the raises will be covered under the project’s implementation costs.

“Since we didn’t make this decision before we had the budget for this year, we went ahead and amended the budget and then we’re going to include it in the budget for next year,” she said.

About 22 of the 39 employees received 10 percent pay increases. The others received 15 percent raises.

Employees with more responsibilities received the bigger pay increases, Martínez said.

“We put together a memo that clearly defined the expectations,” she said. “We’re taking this very seriously because of how important it is to the city.”

On Tuesday and then again on Wednesday, requested a list of employees who received the temporary pay increases. At 4:46 p.m. Wednesday, Martínez asked the newspaper to submit a request for the information under the Inspection of Public Records Act.

Former City Councilor Carmichael Dominguez, who chose to step down rather than seek a fourth term in last month’s election, said councilors were not typically included in decision-making about individual raises or general personnel issues.

Asked about this particular batch of pay hikes, he said, “I think it’s something that probably should have come up — especially since a big part of our budget is salary and benefits. If not the approval of it, then at least some notification of it.”

Asked whether he, as the longtime chairman of the influential Finance Committee, had been made aware of these specific raises, Dominguez said he did not remember any such discussion.

“If all those happened in one day, then yeah, that’s something that needs to be known,” Dominguez said. “But I have to say that it’s not anything new. It’s happened for as long as I’ve been there. Maybe not to that degree, but it’s something that’s happened.”

City Councilor Signe Lindell, who also serves on the Finance Committee, declined to say whether she was aware of the raises. But she said she was on board with the plan.

“People deserve to be compensated with they take on extra work,” she said. “These are sizable asks, [and] this is a very important project to the city.”

City Councilor Mike Harris, another Finance Committee member, said the temporary raises were news to him.

“Your call was the first I heard about the raises,” he said.

But Harris, who has been out of town, deferred comment, saying he had “zero background” on the raises.

“It’s an interesting circumstance,” he said. “But I need to really dig in a little bit deeper to see what’s going on.”

Staff writers Tripp Stelnicki and Milan Simonich contributed to this report.