The Rio Grande Foundation has requested 2013 payroll information for New Mexico’s 16 institutes of higher education (universities, junior colleges, and community colleges). The Foundation has posted this information online in order to make information that is technically “public” (available upon request) more readily-available than before.
The Foundation was able to access records for 15 of New Mexico’s 16 institutes with only New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (New Mexico Tech) failing to comply with the Foundation’s requests.
One institute, New Mexico Tech, failed to comply. A representative of New Mexico Tech stated that employee payroll information was available only in printed format at significant cost.
On the flip side, Rio Grande Foundation President Paul Gessing noted with appreciation that “University of New Mexico and Central New Mexico Community College both post payroll on a publicly-accessible website. This should be the model pursed by all schools”
Gessing continued, saying “New Mexico’s taxpayers support each of these institutes of higher learning. In this day and age with the modern Internet now 20 years old, important public information should be proactively published online for the public to access. While the Rio Grande Foundation is happy to request public records on the public’s behalf, it is unacceptable to not have such basic information readily-available or to not respond to repeated and varied requests.”
Click on the name of each school to access the 2013 payroll of that institute.
New Mexico State University (also includes Doña Ana Community College)
Central New Mexico Community College
New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology: “cannot comply”
NM Tech uses the same payroll system as UNM, CNM, SFCC, NMJC, and Northern. If the smaller institutions can write a simple query to get this information, surely the folks at Tech can do the same. I worked at SFCC in IT for a couple of years and often wrote these types of queries. We viewed Tech as sort of the guru school for technology. I cannot believe they can’t do this.
They claimed that their payroll was kept in a “month-to-month” basis and that they could not compile it all into one email document. Printing it would be quite costly and that’s really not what we’re trying to do anyway. I’m sure they can do it. Heck, they did it a few years back.