Beginning in 2009, Santa Fe employers of minimum-wage workers will have one
more thing to add to their new year's "to do" list: find out how much
the city has adjusted the local wage floor.
Wednesday's City Council vote to amend the pay ordinance links future annual
increases to a federal inflation index.
City administrators will have to use data from the U.S. Department of Labor
each year to re-calculate
In response to a councilor's question about how notice will be given, City
Attorney Frank Katz said it's unlikely the city would be able to individually
contact all employers and affected workers.
The city can announce the yearly adjustment via the Internet and through press
announcements, he said.
The city manager is likely to present a report each December to the elected
governing body that shows the latest minimum-wage information.
That does not mean, however, that the council has discretion over how much pay
levels change each year, he said. "It happens automatically," Katz
said. "They don't need to do anything."
When the federal labor agency publishes its Consumer Price Index data at the
end of 2008, Katz said, city staff will multiply the city's existing minimum
wage by the percentage increase and add the resulting amount to the base rate.
For example, if the current $9.50-an-hour wage had been adjusted at the
beginning of this year based on the reported 3.3 percent increase in the price
index, another 31 cents would have been added, pushing the minimum pay rate to
$9.81.
The Consumer Price Index is a measure of the average change over time in prices
paid by urban consumers for goods and services. It includes food, housing,
transportation, fuel, medical care, education and apparel, among other items,
and accounts for taxes on property and sales taxes, according the agency.
The City Council mandated that the city's minimum-wage changes relate to the
index for the western region, which comprises New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming,
Montana and all states further west, including Alaska and Hawaii. The federal
government monitors several major metropolitan areas and creates specialized
indexes for those, but the closest to Santa Fe is Fort Worth, Texas.
Over the past decade, the index has indicated price increases ranging between a
low of 1.6 percent in 1998 to a high of 3.5 percent in 2000 and 2001.
Making increases automatic rather than subject to yearly council votes was one
of the most important changes to the rules, said Carol Oppenheimer, a Santa Fe
attorney who has helped lobby city officials as part of a group called the
Santa Fe Living Wage Network.
Divisions between advocates of municipal minimum-wage requirements and business
owners who resisted the rules pervaded public discussion in recent years and
created community conflict, she said.
If the city had not amended the ordinance this week, the City Council would
have been required to vote on whether to allow a scheduled increase to $10.50
an hour to take effect in January. Wednesday's amendments removed a clause that
said adjustments were "not self-executing" and couldn't take effect
without governing-body approval.
Opponents of hiking next year's minimum to $10.50 had indicated they would
fight such an increase, Oppenheimer said, so this summer, interested parties
started working on a compromise.
"There was a feeling like we were going to be having these kinds of
conflicts and these fights every year," she said. "The idea was let's
just put this to rest, let's put in an across-the-board $9.50 with the
automatic annual cost-of-living increases so we can all move on to more
pressing issues."
The amendments also will broaden the pay requirements as of January to include
small employers in what Oppenheimer said is an attempt to level the playing
field. Previously, the ordinance only applied to employers with more than two
dozen workers.
Before this week's council vote, Santa Fe's wage requirement was already
reported as the highest of its kind in the nation, and other New Mexico
communities had begun adopting their own wage laws before the state Legislature
limited local jurisdictions from setting rates that are higher than the state's
new minimum of $7.50 an hour.
Oppenheimer said the 2007 state law will allow local governments to set new
wages in 2010, and it's likely the Living Wage Network would lobby Santa Fe
County government to implement a minimum-wage ordinance that year affecting
employers located outside city limits.
Workers or employers who have questions about the city's Living Wage Ordinance
or who want to report a violation can call the city of Santa Fe's Constituent
Services Office at 955-6949.
Contact Julie Ann Grimm at
986-3017 or jgrimm@sfnewmexican.com.