The State Investment Council manages New Mexico’s multibillion-dollar fund. Its leader says more staff is needed.

Jon Clark began his role at the New Mexico State Investment Council last year as “employee No. 22.”

Upon arrival, he was provided staffing charts showing the agency had the same number of employees as it did in 2008 when managing around $12 billion in funds. At that point, in 2024, the SIC oversaw $54 billion.

“It seemed clear that we needed some additional staffing to handle that additional amount of money; to manage, to invest and to monitor,” Clark, the state investment officer, recalled. “Now, we’ve grown even further.”

As of this year, the SIC manages one of the largest sovereign wealth funds in the nation at a staggering $66 billion. This includes oversight of the state’s 14 permanent, endowment and reserve funds. By 2050, Clark predicts the council will represent an “entire third” of New Mexico’s revenue stream.

Late last year, Clark said the agency had Ashby Monk, a Stanford University director with expertise in advising investment organizations, lead a group in analyzing the SIC. Monk’s team compared the SIC’s staffing numbers and managed assets to those of similar groups across the country.

“They came back and said, ‘You are staffed at less than half the number of your peers. Given the amount of money you manage, you should be staffed up to 57 people,’” Clark said.

The SIC currently has 35 employees and, Clark added, most likely needs upward of 60 workers now as assets have grown since Monk’s analysis.

Competing for talent

Clark said a variety of issues contribute to the SIC’s lack of employees. One of the largest challenges is in recruitment, as New Mexico doesn’t have a large institutional investment industry to pull from.

While the agency will do its best to hire locally, Clark said, the SIC needs to recruit from out of state in order to truly grow. With that, however, comes compensation struggles as Monk’s research found the group was “significantly underpaying” its staff, Clark said.

This aligned with comments Clark heard around the office, specifically with SIC members looking to leave the organization for higher pay. The day he began working, Clark met two people who were resigning to do just that.

“These guys have to compete for talent against Wall Street and Silicon Valley,” state Economic Development Secretary Rob Black said. “They need to be able to pay, maybe not dollar-to-dollar, but they need to be competitive with benefits and salaries so that we can have top quality talent.”

The solution? A budget request proposing a 50% increase in staff funding for the 2027 fiscal year in the upcoming 30-day legislative session.

Clark said typically, state agencies get incremental budget raises, and though the SIC continues to build its assets, it has not followed this trend. According to previous Journal reporting, the SIC saw dozens of employee wage bumps this June, totaling an additional $729,600.

Chief Investment Officer Robert “Vince” Smith received a nearly 40% increase, which brought his annual salary to $455,000 and made him the highest-paid employee in the state’s executive branch. In September, Smith retired following a cancer diagnosis. Senior strategist Craig Johnson took an additional $3,240, now bringing in $145,600 per year, which was one of the lower-end raises offered.

SIC spokesperson Charles Wollmann told the Journal that raises from earlier this year should not be conflated with Clark’s efforts now. Then, he took to the Council to demonstrate the “disconnect” in how funds have grown, but staffing has not. He said the agency’s request now for a “larger than typical” budget increase is primarily driven by the growth of assets under management.

The agency needs a nonincremental solution to address staffing, Clark said, adding that the 50% increase still won’t put the SIC on the same level as its peers, but will at least put it “in the ballpark.”

“It’s a realistic picture of how we can actually staff up, because we can’t just flip a switch and suddenly have the right staffing levels,” Clark said. “It will take time to get there, but I think this is the right first step.”

Historically, Black said the SIC has helped fund New Mexico education, which utilizes a “cradle to career” initiative to support children from birth through college. Black has also seen the agency’s exponential growth, noting that the size, scale and use of the funds is not seen much anywhere else.

“You can look at Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi and now, New Mexico, that are deploying a sovereign wealth fund aligned with strategic economic development,” Black said. “Those are the examples around the world, so we’ve built something very unique in the United States.”

Black believes it’s imperative that the state invests more in the SIC’s role, beginning with staffing and budgeting. More than returns on investments to the portfolio, he said, it also works to bring revenue and jobs back to New Mexico.

“You don’t want folks who aren’t delivering for the state managing $66 billion. You want them to be some of the best in the world, and we have great people there now, but they need help,” Black said. “They need additional resources to make sure they’re continuing to deliver for the state of New Mexico.”

Avoiding breaking points

Lack of staffing adds extra work onto the plates of current SIC employees, Clark said. The agency’s private equity team, for example, is made up of three people.

Up to this point, Clark said the team has been responsible for its entire national private equity portfolio, which the state adds billions of dollars to each year. Now, they also oversee the New Mexico-focused strategic venture capital program, which backs groups such as UP.Abundance, Roadrunner Venture Studios and others.

“They are just about at a breaking point because they are so overworked,” Clark said. “We need to make sure that we’re building out that team so that no one on that team reaches a breaking point. If we lost one or two key people, the program would really fall apart.”

Ideally, Clark said he would have six dedicated members on the team.

State Sen. George Muñoz, D-Gallup, agreed that with the amount of money the Legislature has put into the SIC, the agency needs to have the best people investing it. He said attracting that talent with the current salaries will be challenging.

“If it was me, I would be hiring someone to do the hiring for me with a skill set that does that, that’s what I would be looking for,” Muñoz said. “Saying, ‘I want the youngest and the brightest when they have one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, what’s that pay like?’ Some of those Wall Street brokers are making half-a-million dollars a year.”

Admittedly a “small government” guy, state Rep. John Block, R-Alamogordo, said the SIC’s product of work has some of the best returns on investments and, if staffing up and budget increases help those state funds, then he’s all for it.

Clark said just 15 years ago, no one knew that the SIC would grow into what it is today. In 2023, Senate Bill 26 diverted excess oil and gas tax revenue, along with federal leasing revenue, into one of the state’s permanent funds. The change was intended to make state revenue more stable by replacing some volatile energy funds with more reliable investment distributions. Clark said, as a result of that bill, the team is receiving billions annually that it wouldn’t have had otherwise.

“The Legislature would have had to come back each year and figure out, ‘OK, what do we cut?’ No new programs, no new initiatives, and that bill does seem to have solved that, but it did create this strong inflow of money into our funds that wasn’t expected before,” Clark said. “It’s a very different situation no one could have predicted, and our staffing levels need to increase as a result.”