I provided a few comments for this article which appeared in the Santa Fe New Mexican. Seems like the City of Santa Fe would rather not post salaries at all if they can’t provide a searchable database like the City of Albuquerque has done.
Certainly, Albuquerque’s efforts at transparency are to be emulated, but that doesn’t mean you can’t start somewhere. In the meantime, check out what we got when we requested payroll information from the City of Santa Fe.
Long before the Internet was invented, my home town of Oak Park, IL, (population 60,000) published the salaries of ALL municipal and school employees by name in an annual public notice in the local newspaper. This should not be rocket science, even for New Mexico.
Let’s add to this by including all relationships of family, father, son, cousin, etc, to eliminate or reduce nepotism.
Further, city, county and states should establish best practices for their hiring and operations.