Santa Fe Living Wage to Increase to $10.29

Santa Fe will soon have the highest mandatory minimum wage in the nation. Government officials announced Thursday that compensation for city workers will increase to $10.29 an hour starting March 1.

That puts the City Different ahead of San Francisco, where the minimum wage is $10.24 an hour.

“I feel very positive about our living wage law and I think the process we’ve started to notify businesses and the public about how the wage is adjusted gives business people a good month to get ready,” Santa Fe Mayor David Coss said.

Santa Fe’s minimum wage is currently $9.85 per hour. But a city ordinance requires that wage hikes be calculated every year based on a federally determined annual consumer price index for the western United States. On Thursday, the federal Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that, over 2011, the index had increased by 2.8 percent.

Also factored into the $10.29 number is a CPI increase from 2010 that Santa Fe officials failed to notice and implement. That increase would have brought Santa Fe’s wage to $9.99 an hour last year.

Simon Brackley, president of the Santa Fe Chamber of Commerce, said his organization is “strongly opposed to increasing the minimum wage again in this economic climate.”

“This will make Santa Fe unable to compete with neighboring communities. Effectively, this increase is going to be a tax on businesses who want to hire entry level employees,” Brackley said.