Española City Councilors at their Oct. 26 meeting were presented with a well-thought out and reasoned proposal to change the qualifications and pay for the city’s municipal judge.
Instead of accepting facts and looking at the reality of a $13.2 million budget, they chose to parse the language of both proposed changes and incorporate it into a muddy mess. To make matters worse, politics by some of our worst councilors led the charge to make the changes not take effect at the next election in March 2022, as is the norm. The changes will take effect after the election.
We have the best municipal judge Española has ever had. He’s an attorney with years of experience in several capacities. However, we’re paying him a lot more than his peers.
Our municipal judge, earning $95,305 annually, makes more than municipal judges in Taos, $44,000; Rio Rancho, $70,000 and Los Alamos, $75,000, as well as many other New Mexico cities (Alamogordo, $49,000). We use those cities for comparison because then you think of those cities, you think money. Los Alamos has the highest per capita rate of millionaires in the country. Rich Californians and Texans have taken over Taos and drive its budget. Rio Rancho hosts Intel. What else is there to say about their budget?
Española, on the other hand, relies on very low Gross Receipts Taxes. Our budget lives and dies on Walmart sales. Our economy depends on our residents working in Los Alamos and the state of New Mexico, coming back and sharing their bounty with us. In short, our budget is always strained.
The change to require a municipal judge to have 60 credit hours of college is low-balling the requirement to say the least. While municipal judges aren’t hearing life and death cases and stick mostly to misdemeanors and minor felonies, they still must be able to read the law, understand it and most importantly apply it on a case-by-case basis.
Before the ordinance was changed to require the 60 hours, there was no education requirement. None. Neither was there an age requirement. Only in Española.
We routinely elect that lower caliber of judge, along with their lack of morals and huge self-interest, mostly because of politics but also because we’ve always accepted undereducated politicians playing God with the bench.
Establishing a requirement for some education at least ensures the elected judge can read the law. There remains the debate whether someone without a higher education degree can understand and apply that law.
So now we can get a better caliber of judge but what shall we pay them?
Instead of listening to City Attorney Jonas Nahoum, our city councilors, few of whom have even 60 credit hours of college, decided they knew better. This is always done under the guise of “constituent representation.” That’s code for “I owe some people who helped me get elected.”
Nahoum brought a clear and concise ordinance change of a flat $70,000 salary for the judge. Great pay in a poor area. City councilors representing the city with one of the lowest budgets, which pays its municipal judge the most, will have (after 2022) a tiered system to pay people more if they have more education.
Without an associates degree, a municipal judge will earn $50,000; with an associates degree, $60,000; with a bachelor’s degree, $70,000 and with a master’s degree or higher, $80,000.
On the surface that looks like it will attract better-educated people for the position. We can hope.
This is no small task, requiring a person to take on not only a heavy and dense reading load but they must be a leader, human resource manager, have superior people skills as they interact with citizen after citizen. They not only operate a court and its associated calendar but are responsible for the state filings and meeting those requirements. Don’t forget about managing the $3 million budget.
However, the fact remains we are paying too much for a municipal judge. Additionally, we must again use Councilor Justin Salazar-Torres’ quote from a September meeting. “Heaven forbid we place requirements on someone in charge of a $3 million budget.”
However, in our area, outside of the bloated salaries of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, $70,000 is a very good salary, especially when considering the court’s hours and staff.
There’s the additional problem of what courses pack that 60 hours of college. Did the judicial candidate take them at a community college night school or at a university? Those experiences are vastly different and largely produce a very different person.
Most freshman and sophomore student schedules are packed with catching up with what they didn’t learn in high school and the core classes. We could hope for some low level accounting and budget classes and perhaps a management 101 but are they ready to lead a staff, meet state obligations and do right by the citizens who come in front of them daily?
That’s doubtful, but that’s what we will have after the 2022 election.