Albuquerque –
The City of Albuquerque comprises 26 departments, each one responsible for various municipal services and functions. These departments range from public safety and infrastructure to community services and cultural affairs. We found there are 25 people who were classified as spokespeople for departments for the city. These positions all fall under Mayor Tim Keller’s administration.
The staggering amount spent yearly on public information officers is $2,074,384.00. This figure does NOT include the benefit packages offered by the city or overtime.
We found that every hour CABQ PIOs make $997.30, every week they make $39,892.00, and a whopping $159,568.00 a month goes to funding these positions.
We pulled up the salaries on the City of Albuquerque’s transparency site, and the 25 people we identified were all allegedly able to e-mail and speak to the media.
The Mayor’s Office, with a budget of $422,032, holds the distinction of having the highest PIO budget in the office. This is for four full time PIO staffers. The highest paid in the department is Director of Communications Staci Drangmeister, with a $127,462.40 yearly salary.
The second highest paid department is APD; they spend $378,830.40 yearly on PIOs. The highest-paid person within APD is Director of Communications Gilbert Gallegos, with a $127,462.40 a year, without his overtime factored in.
A majority of salaries fall in the range of $33 to $40 per hour. There are also a few higher salaries, extending up to around $62 a hour for Gilbert and Staci. There are also four hard-working city employees who handle multiple departments. Those are Shannon Kunkel, Dan Mayfield, Reed Bobroff, and Jorge Hernandez. This information is from our research on who is considered a PIO under cabq.gov department listings. There are some employees who do PIO duties, but it is not in their title.
The lowest-paid PIO is Diana Lopez of the Aviation Department, and she makes $54,849.60 a year.
A majority of these departments are gracious and respond back to our inquiries due to our lawsuit with the City of Albuquerque, a judge ordered ABQ RAW to receive all e-mails from the CABQ press offices. The Mayor’s office does not respond to our inquiries, and they are not legally obligated to (thus the no text back or no respond reference). The only legal requirement the City is required to adhere to is to send email releases to us and not deny us access to media events.
Our data was compelled to publicly available transparency information available on City of Albuquerque website. The numbers do NOT factor in overtime that some of these public information officer’s may incur during their off duty hours. PIO’s such as the APD PIOs often work many times after hours and are compensated accordingly with overtime pay.
The City’s operating budget discussion start tomorrow at the Comity of the Whole meeting. The Mayor’s Office sent to the City Council a 1.5 billion dollar budget for next fiscal year. That is up 2.3% ($19.2 M) from last year.