By Daniel J. Chacón
The Santa Fe New Mexican
SANTA FE, N.M. — Cindy Abbott set her sights on Santa Fe decades ago.
Abbott said she fell in love with the city and the surrounding area after she started coming to Santa Fe to snowboard and race mountain bikes professionally in the 1990s.
Abbott, who grew up in Austin, Texas, and pursued a career in firefighting in her hometown, was just waiting for the right opportunity to make the jump.
“I really just knew that the mountains and the ease of recreation were going to be a great fit for me and knew that I wanted to work for the city of Santa Fe Fire Department,” she said. “But I was waiting for that lateral recruit process to open because I didn’t want to go through a whole six-month academy again.”
Under the leadership of Chief Brian Moya, the fire department has made it easier to hire lateral firefighters, or firefighters who transfer from one department to another with training under their belt. The policy change is part of a larger effort to fill stubborn vacancies in the city’s public safety departments, and those efforts are starting to pay off, including with a record number of female firefighters and a high number of female police officers.
Although the fire department has 10 vacancies currently, it is in the process of hiring several new firefighters, which will leave it with four vacancies in its frontline operations division after July 22.
The police department has 13 vacancies out of 169 sworn officer positions, but two new officers are expected to join the force June 21, leaving it with 11, said Deputy Chief Ben Valdez. That’s down from 38 vacancies in July 2022.
“We have a better story than we’ve had in quite some time,” Valdez said.
“These are rates that we have not had, I’d say, in at least 10 years for police officers,” he added. The department has also made strides in filling vacancies among its non-sworn staff, he said, which includes public safety aids and evidence technicians, where only five positions remain unfilled.
“We’re looking really good with staff,” he said.
The Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office, though, is leading the way with only one vacancy out of its 94 sworn positions.
“We attribute much of our success in recruiting and hiring qualified deputies to an innovative pilot program we have implemented,” Denise Womack-Avila, a spokesperson for the sheriff’s office, wrote in an email, referring to a program that gives patrol deputies four-day workweeks at full-time pay.
State incentives pay off
Stringent hiring requirements and public perceptions about police officers after such incidents as the 2020 killing of George Floyd are among the factors that have made it challenging to hire police officers. Fire also has a rigorous hiring process, and Santa Fe’s high cost of living doesn’t help either department.
Adequate staffing in both departments is critical to meet Santa Fe’s public safety needs.
Efforts to reduce public safety vacancies in the city — a years-long problem in communities across New Mexico — include state retention incentives, recruitment drives, advertising and community engagement, as well as the lateral policy change at the fire department.
“It took me a little while to convince this department to go there, but we do laterals so we don’t have to put them in the academy so long,” Moya said. “We don’t have to pay them to be in there, and they can help the community faster. ... It benefits the city because we don’t have to train them for six months, and we’re paying them to help the community, not train.”
Lateral hires still have to go through an academy, but it’s six weeks instead of the usual six months.
“It took me a lot of convincing to get them on because of the pride and ownership of this department,” Moya said. “They wanted them to go through the whole academy, and I told them the value is still there. We will still give them an academy. It will just be an abbreviated one.”
Valdez said retention funds made available by the state to encourage officers to stay on the job have made a big difference.
Under House Bill 193, which passed the Legislature unanimously in 2024 and was signed into law by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, full-time certified law enforcement officers are eligible for the bonuses, which are calculated by years of service.
“I know a lot of our officers really look forward to that, especially when they’re coming up on those anniversaries,” Valdez said.
Officers become eligible upon serving five, 10, 15 and 20 years of service from the anniversary of their hire date with a law enforcement agency in New Mexico, with the bonus amount being 5% of the officer’s base salary, the legislation states.
The city also received state funding to assist in hiring of a handful of crime scene technicians and analysts, Valdez said.
“We added five additional staff members, and that was made possible with assistance from the state of New Mexico by giving us funding over the course of three years where they assist us with paying for the salaries of those individuals,” he said. “With those five positions, once we put out the announcement, we filled them very quickly in the first year.”
Valdez also said the department’s recruiters “have been doing a lot work” in their recruitment efforts, which have been boosted by officers already on the force.
“Our current staff members are also out there talking to folks and saying, ‘Hey, I think you’d be a good addition to our team,’ and encouraging them to come and apply to work for the police department,” Valdez said. “So, it’s been a twofold approach in that area.”
The police department’s workforce, though, is “very young,” prompting the department to beef up its training, he said.
“We’re working on proficiency,” Valdez said. “That’s a big thing.”
Moya said hiring at the fire department has been challenging in recent years. But the trend is changing.
“This last year, we had 113 people apply,” he said. “Those numbers haven’t been around for five years.”
Moya didn’t know what changed but said the fire department has upped recruitment.
“We do really good about advertising,” he said. “We do really good about preparing people. We let them come to info sessions for about four hours, and we tell them what the job is about. We let them also test out on the physical agility courses, so we’ve changed it. When I started 23 years ago, you had one shot, and if you dropped anything, you were gone. ... We pretty much made it where we’re not trying to hide from you. We’re not trying to make it difficult. We’re trying to support you, making sure you understand how good this place is.”
Moya said the coronavirus pandemic “kind of pushed people away.”
“I think we’re finally starting to bring people back,” he said. “These are good, stable jobs. I think during COVID, people realized how scary or how dangerous the world can be.”
Female firefighters
Money may be a factor, with entry-level pay at the fire department better than in the past.
“This last year with the class and [compensation] study that the city did, it increased pay by almost $10,000 for entry-level firefighters,” Moya said. “So, our starting pay is $61,000 a year. … If college isn’t your thing, this is a good way to provide for your family.”
Moya also said he has hired more female firefighters than previous chiefs.
“In my time in three and a half years of being chief, I’ve hired five,” he said. “Before that, it was two in the last 10 [years]. … Before we hired the five, there was only three in operations.”
The sheriff’s office has 10 female deputies in the field working patrol; the police department has 24.
“The National Police Institute shared in 2024 that women represent about 12% of police officers in the U.S.,” Valdez wrote in an email. “SFPD is currently slightly above the average at about 18%.”
Moya said the hiring of female firefighters was intentional.
“I’ll tell you why,” said Moya, a father of four girls whose wife has been a Santa Fe County firefighter for 18 years and whose mother is the chief at the Galisteo Volunteer Fire Department.
“I kind of have no choice,” he said. “It’s a positive thing, and I get that influence from home, so I’m like the one guy who has to say, ‘If my wife can do it, and she’s done it for so many years, why can’t we have everybody else?’ ”
The standards are the same for both men and women, he said.
“They have to pass the same test,” he said, adding his training officer told him female firefighters performed better at the academy than their male counterparts.
“They were beating them up in the physical portion and in the classroom, so it’s a good thing,” he said.
Abbott described her experience working in Santa Fe as “awesome.”
“If you just work hard, do your work, you put in the time and do your job, then you’re going to earn respect just like anybody else,” she said. “They’re your brothers at the end of the day.”
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