Richardson hires fare well despite cuts

While the governor might talk your ear off about taxes, education and the Rail Runner, one subject remains off-limits: the political jobs he's handed out and then protected as the state budget plunged into crisis.

Take for example Maxine Otero. The governor got her a job doing secretarial work in the state prison system and set her salary at $60,000 a year to do office work.

That's nearly twice what the state pays a trained correctional officer at the Penitentiary of New Mexico.

But ask questions about her qualifications and how she got the cushy secretarial job, and the governor won't say. Yet there are some clues.

Maxine's father is wealthy Santa Fe contractor Sonny Otero, one of the governor's biggest campaign supporters. Sonny Otero has contributed some $86,000 to Richardson's Democratic campaigns, according to the New York Times.

So how did his daughter get her job?

"I want to be fair," said Dr. Zane Reeves, who teaches public policy at the University of New Mexico. "This governor's probably not much different from many other chief executives. They put their supporters in jobs that are rewarding, to say the least."

Maxine Otero is not the governor's only political hire and is part of a process Republican Gov. Gary Johnson said he tried to tamp down before left the governor's office in 2002.

"I think that was the tradition before I took office, and clearly it's a tradition that's been reestablished," he said.

And then there's former state Rep. Bennie Aragón. The governor tapped Aragón to be the New Mexico State Fair's Community Legislative Liaison.

It's a unique government position with no job description or defined duties. It's not clear what a Community Legislative Liaison might do, but whatever it is, Aragón is paid $61,000 a year to do it.

How does he spend his day? Consider Monday, Feb. 22. Bennie strolled into work at 10 a.m. and two hours later was off to Walgreens for a little shopping. At 1:15 p.m. the community-legislative liaison was back on the fairgrounds. At 3:05 p.m. it was quitting time, and Bennie called it a day.

Vague duties and high salaries disturb state Rep. Larry Larrañaga, R-Albuquerque, who deals with the spending of taxpayer money as a member of the House Appropriations Committee.

"Many of those don't even have a job description or duties that really says, "T his is what the job is, this is what it entails, and these are the qualifications that are required for that,'" Larrañaga said. "It bothers me extremely, extremely, a lot."

The governor doles out about 450 state jobs that are exempt from the state merit system. That includes positions from highest-level cabinet secretaries to administrative assistants.

How does the governor decide whom to hire and what to pay them? That's a gubernatorial secret.

"This is not the real world," Johnson said. "These are jobs that would not exist in the private sector because the private sector actually has to meet payrolls and generate revenue."

With the state in the midst of a budget crisis, the governor's job hires are drawing legislative fire.

"We have a budget that is in the red by $500 million, and we've not had the discipline to say we have to restrain from spending," Larrañaga said. "We have continued to spend like a drunken sailor."

To Sen. John Arthur Smith of Deming, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and a fellow Democrat, Richardson has abused his power.

"No. 1, he's aggravating the financial situation of the state of New Mexico," Smith said. "I think he's well aware of that."

In response to New Mexico's money crisis, the governor issued a bold directive to cut state spending. He ordered a freeze on all state hiring and said he would eliminate dozens of his appointed exempt jobs.

Even his own personal staff would be slashed costing aide Teresa Casados her $96,000-a-year position in his capitol office.

However it's not likely Casados had a going-away party. Just days after her position was eliminated in the governor's office, Casados resurfaced on the public payroll in Albuquerque at the Department of Workforce Solutions, the state labor agency.

Casados got not only a new job but a pay raise to boot. The former aide became the department's new governor's-exempt $99,000-a-year deputy cabinet secretary.

As a cost-cutting measure, the governor also eliminated Lloyd Garley's $89,000-a-year job at the labor department. But Garley didn't have to stand in the unemployment line very long.

Instead someone simply created a brand-new classified job just for Garley. Although his salary was cut to $75,000, Garley was back on the job at the labor agency with the added protection of a classified position within the state merit system.

And it's not just state jobs that are frozen. The governor also put a halt to pay raises. But KRQE News 13 has learned not all of New Mexico's 22,000 government employees had their pay checks frozen.

Despite the governor's directive, a News 13 investigation found hundreds of state workers getting pay raises anyway.