State Investment Council: It's time for a pay raise. How about $122K more annually?

At the start of this month, New Mexico’s Chief Investment Officer Vince Smith made $314,800 a year. By last week, Smith’s salary was $437,500 — a nearly 40% increase.

It’s one of dozens of raises that went into effect for employees at the New Mexico State Investment Council this month. In total, the agency is paying its workers an additional $729,600.

State Investment Officer Jon Clark hopes to continue raising salary ranges in the long term, an objective he said stems from the positions being historically underpaid. Leadership still determines individual salaries based on experience and performance.

The SIC is responsible for investing and growing the state’s dozen or so permanent funds, which total about $63 billion today. By 2039, state economists estimate that the SIC will become the single largest source of revenue for the general fund, overtaking oil and gas revenues, which currently account for around a third of the fund.

The SIC struggles to recruit and retain workers, Clark said, because the state agency has historically underpaid its workers compared to other public investment bodies, let alone the private sector. For example, Alaska’s Chief Investment Officer Marcus Frampton and Texas’ Chief Investment Officer Anca Ion both have annual salaries of about $500,000.

Understaffing and comparatively low salaries at the SIC could cause the state to lose more than $300 million annually, according to investment firm Ascension, which the SIC contracted last year to research the issue.

This is the first time the SIC has ever increased its pay structures, said Clark, who started in his role in January 2024. The newly adjusted salaries are partly paid for with taxpayer dollars via the general fund.

“If New Mexicans want to be concerned about anything, we should be concerned about how can we try to invest the money as best as we can to get those additional returns, not about costs that are a tiny fraction of the additional returns,” Clark said.

The pay raises at the agency range from 2.4% to 39%, data shows. That equates to a low-end raise of $3,240 per year, for senior strategist Craig Johnson, and a high-end raise of $122,686 per year, which Smith received.

The next highest increase was for Chief General Counsel Evan Land, who went from making $185,400 a year to about $232,700 a year, a raise of almost $47,300.

To enact the raises, the SIC in March approved increases to its broader pay structure, bumping up pay bands across the board. The Legislature earlier this year moved money around in the agency’s budget to greenlight the increases.

The pay raises didn’t include Clark, the staffer who led the charge to increase the salaries. However, in the SIC’s most recent meeting in May, the council approved a 5% increase to Clark’s salary after a closed-session performance review.

He currently makes $293,550 annually, according to New Mexico’s Sunshine Portal, and in July will start making $308,227 per year with the raise.

Clark clarified that the 5% raise includes the statewide 4% cost of living adjustment, which takes effect for all state employees in July, meaning he’s receiving a 1% increase on top of that.

“I had nothing to do with it. My goal was to get the team paid better so that we could be staffed up properly. ... So I gave no recommendation to the council, no request to the council for my salary,” Clark said.

The other pay raises mostly align with the median salaries of other states’ public fund workers, Clark said. He added that “this is not enough to truly be competitive.”

Only two states — Alaska and Texas — have sovereign wealth funds close to New Mexico’s, which is the second-largest in the nation, and Clark said this pay raise still doesn’t raise pay enough to meet salaries in those states, which offer private sector-level pay for hard-to-recruit positions.

That’s why Clark plans to approach the Legislature again next year asking for more money to spend on personnel — not only for raises but also to add more positions — though he doesn’t have a definite number in mind yet. He plans to adjust pay bands annually every March moving forward.

There are 14 investment employees at the SIC, which puts each worker in charge of about $4.1 billion, according to SIC meeting materials. That’s more than double what public investors in other states manage, according to Ascension.

If the SIC doesn’t increase its staffing levels, each investment team member could be responsible for managing $7 billion each, given the rapid rate of growth of New Mexico’s accounts, according to the meeting materials. The money the SIC oversees has tripled in the last 10 years and doubled in the last five.

“(The goal is to) go from a situation where we’re understaffed and probably not doing our best as a result of being understaffed, to going to a point where we’re able to better retain people, able to better recruit people and perform better,” Clark said. “If our performance goes up by a percent, that percent on a $63 billion fund is $630 million a year.”