New Mexico’s Public Servants Doing More with Less; Deserve Pay Raises
Op-Ed by Senator Pete Campos (D-Colfax, Guadalupe, Harding, Mora, Quay, San Miguel & Taos)
New Mexico public employees are doing more and more work with fewer and fewer resources. This cycle must end or we risk losing our best and brightest to other states.
Public servants serve our diverse population across the vast expanse of our nation’s fifth largest state, but they are doing so with almost 25 percent fewer employees than just a few years ago. In addition to this significant understaffing problem, those public employees — highway maintenance workers, correctional officers, child abuse and neglect investigators, librarians and health care workers — earn lower wages on average than workers in surrounding western states.
This is a primary reason why New Mexico state government has experienced such difficulty attracting and retaining our best and brightest. Despite our best efforts, the State Personnel Office struggles to hire enough workers to replace those who retire or are lured away from New Mexico public service by better wages elsewhere.
State personnel directors have appeared before legislative committees each year bemoaning their inability to recruit and retain the next generation of highly skilled public servants. By their own admission, many New Mexico public sector jobs pay far lower than those in neighboring states. This alone is cause for alarm. But what has turned this into a crisis is that policymakers in the executive and legislative branches have yet to develop a plan to raise public employee compensation across the board.
We have provided additional compensation to some specific workers — such as child abuse investigators and state police officers — following tragedies due to understaffing and low morale. But we must recognize that as a state, we all rise or fall together. Providing raises here and there, while perhaps solving an immediate problem, only highlights the larger issue: we need a plan to fix the entire public employee compensation system.
New Mexico is one of the few states that is losing population — 1,300 fewer people lived in New Mexico in 2014 than in 2013 — and population has only grown by 1.3 percent since the 2010 census, while the national population has grown 3.3 percent. New Mexicans, including public servants, are moving to other states where they can find better paying jobs.
We take pride in our strong family traditions in New Mexico, but the reality is that our sons and daughters are departing the Land of Enchantment not for worldly adventures or experience, but because they cannot make ends meet here at home.
We have the power to make changes today to our public employee compensation system that will help keep New Mexicans here tomorrow. Workers may be going away, but the work that needs to be done is not going anywhere.
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