City councilors Monday night took aim at Mayor Tim Keller’s administrative staff over an independent report that found pandemic-relief money may have been improperly used to provide employee bonuses.
Councilor Dan Lewis last week sent a letter to New Mexico U.S. Alexander Uballez, notifying his office of alleged discrepancies found by the city’s Office of the Inspector General.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office, said Tuesday the agency has received the report and correspondence from Lewis and is reviewing the matter.
The Inspector General report, issued last week, alleged the administration in 2022 took grant money marked for early childhood education programs and used it to pay cash bonuses to the mayor’s staff.
The total of the alleged bonuses is almost $290,000. Those include almost $20,000 to a fiscal manager and almost $11,000 to a deputy director.
Associate Chief Administrative Officer Carla Martinez told councilors the child development centers depend on centralized administration for some services, including fiscal management and human resources.
A response from the city included in the report says the determination of premium pay disbursements was based on guidance from state authorities.
“It was further defined that eligibility included direct service personnel, administrative personnel (department leadership, HR and fiscal), janitorial and maintenance staff, bus drivers and cooks as applicable,” the response states. “Based on the recommendation of OIG, the (Division of Child & Family Development) will review its determinations and take appropriate action, if necessary.”
The American Rescue Plan Act, signed by President Joe Biden in March 2021, included money to provide financial relief to help childcare providers defray unexpected business costs associated with the pandemic and stabilize their operations so they could stay open.
The city’s Department of Family and Community Services received grants for 21 childcare centers; the grants totaled $8,855,600, according to the inspector general’s office.
The inspector general’s office recommends the city look into whether it should try to get the money back from the employees who received the payments or move the expenditures to the general fund and pay back the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
According to grant information from the New Mexico Early Childhood Education & Care Department, wages and benefits for child care program personnel are an allowable use for the money. The department urged providers to spend the money on raising the wages of child care staff, and listed staff bonuses, premium or hazard pay and ongoing professional development or training as other allowable personnel costs.
In response to an inquiry from the inspector general’s office, the report states, the early childhood department said the money “cannot be used to provide pay to personnel who are not staff of a licensed child care program or are not working at a licensed child care center.”
Councilor Renee Grout asked whether all teachers received premium pay and whether it helped with retention.
Martinez said all teachers did receive the pay, but that more time was needed to ascertain any impact it had on retention.
Grout also expressed concern about the report’s allegation of unauthorized electronic signatures on some grant documents. In one case, the report says, the signature on an application bore the name of an employee who had retired about nine months prior.
“The selection of a retired employee as the affirming provider who did not have access to the system reflects that someone other than the affirming provider submitted the application using the retired employee’s name and electronic signature,” the report states.
Grout asked whether there is a policy of signing an individual’s name to a document without that person’s knowledge. City Chief Administrative Officer Samantha Sengel said the administration at times permits some staff to sign off on documents for employees who are lower in the hierarchy. She said all the child development centers at the time were administered through Family and Community Service, and someone there could potentially have been authorizing for all of them.
Lewis criticized the administration’s response to the report, which he characterized as an attack on the inspector general’s office.
Lewis said the administration had the opportunity to include in the report comments pledging to improve its practices and correct any improper actions.
“But that’s absolutely not what happened,” he said. “What happened here is this administration absolutely slamming the Office of Inspector General, delegitimizing this office that we set up for transparency, and saying ‘out of her jurisdiction,’ and making excuses and no clear indication of going to learn from it at all.”
Sengel said the city’s Accountability in Government Oversight Committee — not the administration — determined that the Office of the Inspector General lacked sufficient jurisdiction to investigate one or more of the allegations contained in the report.
She also said the city did respond to the findings, but didn’t have the entire report at that time.
“We didn’t know what employees they were saying were improperly paid,” she said. “I wasn’t here, but I reviewed all of the documents … those payments were based on the fact that, at the time, we were in the midst of a pandemic, and when everybody else went home, these employees were here working, four days after the COVID pandemic hit, and everything was shut down across the state, across the nation, across the world.”
She said the child development centers had to be open because “essential employees” such as restaurant workers, firefighters and law enforcement officers, couldn’t stay home.
City Chief Financial Officer Kevin Sourisseau said he was working in the Department of Municipal Development at the time and he did not get any additional compensation and doubts that any administrative staff did. He said it’s not uncommon for the city to award hazard pay, and that the administration is looking at who may have received such during the time covered by the report.