Teachers, other public employees may not get annual raises, according to new state budget

Teachers, university employees, firefighters, law enforcement and other public sector workers may not receive their yearly cost-of-living raises after wage increases were cut from the latest draft of the state budget.

Public employees were set to receive 1% raises before the item was removed due to funding concerns.

In a meeting of the Senate Finance Committee on Thursday night, Sen. Jeff Steinborn, D-Las Cruces, asked committee officials if the raises had been removed, which principal financial analyst Adrian Avila confirmed. 

Changes to the budget bill did not leave enough capacity to fund the $62 million, Avila said.

“We had to find the recurring capacity somewhere, so that came from the public employees. So there will not be a raise this year,” Avila said Thursday.

This will be the first year under Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham that public employees will not receive a raise, according to Whitney Holland, president of the New Mexico chapter of the American Federation of Teachers. Last year, public sector workers — educators, bus drivers, librarians, corrections officers, nurses, social workers — got a 3% raise, Holland said.

“It’s a kick in the teeth,” Holland said.

If it passes in the Senate, House Bill 47, which advanced through the House of Representatives in a unanimous vote Wednesday, would require employers to pay 80% of health insurance premiums for educators, putting them on par with other state employees, who had their premiums lowered via a bill signed into law last year.

Sen. George Muñoz, D-Gallup, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, told the group the cheaper health insurance benefits would end up saving workers more than the raises would have afforded them. 

“(The health insurance benefits) are more meaningful to me than a 1% raise, which means like $26 a paycheck,” Muñoz told the committee.

Muñoz addressed the raises in a Friday afternoon committee hearing, telling lawmakers the state had spent $1.6 billion over the last four years for pay increases and health care benefits for public employees. Of that total, $1.3 billion went toward pay raises, while the remainder paid for health insurance benefits and pensions.

Employees have had a 20% pay raise over five years, he said.

“We had to do 80/20 (health care premiums) for teachers, and so 1% just did not make sense with what we had to do with child care and everything else,” Muñoz said.  “There’s a lot of money spent on our state employees. We’ve taken care of them very well.”

Holland said union leaders have received conflicting information about where the money for raises will go. The most recent explanation she’s heard, she said, is that the funding is needed for universal child care.

“I think our folks are reasonable,” Holland said. “If it was something like child care, that’s a bigger conversation. But the smoke and mirrors is not helping.”

Carter Bundy, lobbyist for the New Mexico chapter of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said his union hopes the item will be put back on next year’s budget before its final vote in both chambers. 

When pay doesn’t keep pace with inflation — about 3% yearly — the state is at risk of losing workers who provide essential public services, Bundy said.

“We’re already badly short-staffed in education. We still have huge class sizes in a lot of schools because we don’t have enough educators,” Bundy said. “State, K-12 and university employees can’t keep falling further behind.”

Natalie Robbins covers education for the Journal. You can reach her at nrobbins@abqjournal.com.