CNM publishes wages; employees weigh in

By: Jonathan Gamboa, Layout Designer

Part-time CHSS instructor Robert Anderson said that public policy, transparency and accountability have been very important to him and that as a public institution, CNM should be run in the interest of the public and not for the interest of the local private sector.

He said that he and other professionals are hired at CNM as part-time faculty and staff, and the pay rates included in the online posting of names and wages are not accurately reported.

“I have been to many Governing Board meet­ings, and not once has this issue of transparency been discussed openly,” said Anderson.

Part-time faculty and staff can be expected to work up to 40 hours a week including class prepara­tion and student assistance. However, the employee contract legend provided on the website does not include that time for part-time employees, he said.

Previously on the CNM website, job titles and salaries for each posi­tion were posted without the employee names, said CHSS Admin-Support Specialist Hector Navorro. The staff and faculty direc­tory gave public access to all CNM employees’ names and their titles.

Now that the college is putting together all employ­ees’ financial information in one spot, the exact hourly wages of employees gives the public more personal access to financial data than is needed, he said.

“I don’t see how it is helpful for somebody to have access to employee names and wages, but because we do work for an educational institu­tion we have to have our records open to the public,” said Navarro.

The decision to post the names and wages of all CNM faculty and staff online has received mixed reviews from employees. Some are congratulat­ing the administration for being transparent, others feel ambivalent because CNM employees are part of a public institution and some are upset about losing financial privacy, said CNM President Kathie Winograd.

The college has been sent open records requests for some time, from both internal and external sources, asking that names of faculty and staff mem­bers be added to the pub­licly accessible salary list, she said.

“The decision to post names with corresponding salaries was made so that we could move past the issue of transparency of public access to informa­tion and the community could return its focus to the great things the col­lege is doing for our stu­dents and our community,” said Winograd.

Full-time CHSS instructor Patrick Houlihan said he is of two minds on the wages being posted; there is a level at which infor­mation should be private but that the public should know where and how taxpay­ers’ money is being spent at a public institution.

“I grew up in an era where it was personally and socially impolite to ask someone how much money someone made. However, I personally have no problem with my salary infor­mation being posted online, as I do work for a public institu­tion,” Houlihan said.

Part of the struggle over publicizing information such as CNM’s employee financial data is that pay scales do not represent everything that CNM employ­ees do on a daily basis, so what is shown on the online wages can be confusing, said Houlihan.

CNM’s policy regard­ing employee information requests is that they must go through the Marketing and Communications Office, which handles all public rela­tions for the school he said.

Now that the school is posting public information online, the community has put pressure on CNM to reveal even more, said Winograd.

Members of the com­munity began to ask why CNM did not post employees’ names along with associated wages as APS and UNM did in November, she said.

To view CNM financial information containing names of employees with associated wages, visit cnm.edu/about/ financial/index.php.