City Council expands city manager’s powers amid pandemic
LaPan Hill may approve contracts up to $200K during pandemic without getting approval
Mayor Alan Webber and the City Council unanimously approved a proposal late Wednesday to expand the city manager’s authority to administratively approve contracts of up to $200,000 during a public health emergency, but it wasn’t without debate or consternation.
The council spent more than an hour wrangling over whether to give City Manager Jarel LaPan Hill the ability to sign off on six-figure contracts without council approval. Currently, the city code limits the authority of the city manager to increase, decrease or transfer funds to an amount of up to $60,000.
Expanding the city manager’s contractual authority, which has only been discussed behind the scenes as part of a “good governance” proposal, was included in a bill calling for the council to extend the city’s state of emergency by up to 60 days because of the coronavirus pandemic.
City Councilor Carol Romero-Wirth, who sponsored the bill, said the global public health crisis gives the city the opportunity to test whether giving the city manager more contractual authority works. The proposal calls for LaPan Hill to provide the governing body monthly reports.
Though she eventually voted in support, City Councilor JoAnne Vigil Coppler raised the most objections.
“I am leery of doing a little test on that good-governance document that has not been presented to us and sneaking — well, I guess that’s not a good word — inserting it into this emergency draft,” she said.
An earlier item that generated questions but no opposition was a $500,000 budget transfer to help pay for a wide variety of residents’ needs in the face of the ever-evolving pandemic, from food and rent to transportation and child care services for frontline workers.
“We’ll be bringing the [specifics on spending] back to the council for full transparency as the allocations move out the door, but the whole goal is to get the money out on the street,” Webber said after the vote.
The transfer of money from the so-called Railyard Fund for emergency expenditures will allow the city to be flexible and respond quickly with resources, Finance Director Mary
McCoy told the council during a virtual meeting — the first for Santa Fe — with numerous glitches.
“The priorities of the emergency response funding will continue to evolve as the coronavirus pandemic impacts our community and the needs of our residents and our city change,” she said.
The transfer will leave $800,000 in the Railyard Fund, whose source of revenue is a municipal infrastructure gross receipts tax, McCoy said. The ordinance enabling the tax required the payoff of revenue bonds, which have since been paid off, she said.
“The ordinance allows us to use the
funds to be spent on any municipal general purpose, which we have identified at this point” as the immediate needs stemming from the pandemic, McCoy said.
The funds are expected to be funneled through local nonprofits.