NM: City transit officials hope new pay schedule could help attract bus drivers amid 'extreme' shortage

Santa Fe’s bus drivers provide an essential service for the thousands of city residents without a vehicle, providing transportation between work, school and home every day of the year.

“We’re like the mailman,” Andrew Baca, interim director of operations and maintenance at Santa Fe Trails, said in a recent interview. “Snow, rain, sleet, hail — we’re out there. And it’s essential because we provide that connectivity for people’s functionality of life.”

Despite that, the division recently cut back its service hours because of what it described in a news release as an “extreme” driver shortage, an issue which has dogged the division for years.

Starting Feb. 22, hours of operation were reduced from 5:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. on weekdays, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturday and 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Sunday to 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day of the week. The reduction is temporary but there is no set time normal hours will return.

Gabrielle Chavez, transit director of administration, said the reduction in hours came after the sudden deaths of two drivers in the span of several weeks early this year and the abrupt departure of a third because of a personal issue, something she said dealt a heavy blow to the tight-knit department.

The reduction in hours is intended to send a message to staff that leaders want them to work in a healthy environment, but she said it was a difficult decision to make after the work the department has done to try and build back services that were cut because of the pandemic.

“To have to take a step back and reduce service is really disappointing for us, but I think that overall it’s the best thing we could do to alleviate the stress and reduce driver burnout,” she said.

The department has big plans for the future, including a new system of routes that will bring buses to areas that aren’t served now. But first, officials say, it needs to recruit more new drivers.

A new pay structure transit officials hope to adopt soon could help.

‘Just not recruiting’

The department currently has 24 drivers and 56 driver positions, a vacancy rate of about 59% percent. Of the 125 total budgeted positions at the department, 56 are filled.

After a spate of retirements at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Chavez said the division has been relatively stable in terms of retention, with some of the drivers having been with the department for more than a decade.

“We’re retaining the drivers that we have; we’re just not recruiting people,” Chavez said.

Baca said the division’s largest issue in terms of its driver workforce is younger people are not coming on board to replace people who age out of the job the way they did in previous generations.

“It’s an added responsibility where you’re responsible for lives and traffic and passengers and people surrounding you … and there’s a little less motivation to do that these days,” he said.

State-level legalization of marijuana has also presented a challenge: Since the transit agency is federally funded, it has to comply with federal guidelines for drug and alcohol testing, which disallow marijuana use.

Now that people “can find jobs that pay the same or more and still be able to” consume marijuana, that has also created a hiring challenge, Chavez said.

The transit division currently has a budget of about $8 million, which comes from city and North Central Regional Transit District gross receipts tax and federal funding. Chavez said she is “hopeful” the division will continue to be federally funded and said it is not in danger of losing previous grant money.

“We weren’t awarded any kind of clean energy type of grants, so we’re in the clear on that because we didn’t have the capacity to apply for those type of grants,” Chavez said.

In her 19 months with the city Chavez has brought $9.1 million in grants to the division and said how money is allocated is a bigger problem than the need for more money overall.

The department is trying to show people transit is a stable job for people not interested in pursuing a college degree, something they believe can be helped by a new pay structure which makes the department more competitive.

While the city has “amazing benefits,” Baca said its hourly pay is in the “mid- to lower range” compared to surrounding agencies such as Blue Bus or Atomic City Transit, something he thinks presents a challenge to recruitment.

“If you’re attracting that younger audience, they’re not necessarily thinking about retirement; they’re thinking about how much that is per hour,” Baca said.

Transit leadership is currently in negotiations with the city’s Human Resources Department to create more tiers to the division’s pay system for drivers. Under the current system, Baca said all drivers who have a commercial driver’s license make similar pay.

“I have a driver who’s been here for four to five years versus a driver who comes out of gaining his CDL with us, and within a year’s time they could be at the same pay rate,” he said. “So there is no real tiering system.”

What the new structure will look like is still being negotiated, but Baca said the system will be designed to both incentivize enrollment and reward retention.

“How long they’ve been here is definitely going to hold a value,” he said.

City officials provided limited information in response to questions about the new pay scale.

“The City evaluated a proposal to increase pay for transit drivers across the board in collaboration with the bargaining unit,” city spokesperson Regina Ruiz wrote in a Friday email, noting any pay changes to employees in the city’s American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 3999 requires communication with union leadership.

Union local vice president Louis Demella said he anticipates the union will support the new pay structure for bus drivers, saying they deserve more support so the division can expand.

“I see [cutting hours] as the administration taking a regressive stance as far as getting public transit in the city of Santa Fe — hours should be increasing and days of service expanding, but instead it’s contracting,” he said.

The union has been in negotiations with the city on its master contract, which expired mid-2020, for about five years and is currently in binding arbitration, which Demella said will likely conclude within the next two months.

Millions of dollars in pay raises went to city employees at the start of the current fiscal year following a class and compensation study finding many city workers were underpaid compared to market conditions. Similar to the transit division’s potential new pay structure, the raises are intended to reward longevity.

The city and the union reached an agreement for the first 25% of the class and compensation increases in August, but Demella said the second 25%, intended to go into effect at the start of 2025, was tied to negotiations for the master contract and has not been given to AFSCME members, something he said disappointed him.

“We didn’t think the city would try and use that as a bargaining chip,” he said.

In the meantime, transit-specific discussions are ongoing. City Councilor Alma Castro, who hosted a community town hall focused on transit in February, said she supported a tiered structure for bus drivers.

“They have a really good idea of what they need; we just need to implement it,” she said.

Doing more with less

The reduction in service has spurred frustration among some riders who use the bus to get to their jobs in the early morning, including Margo Sanabria, who said getting to her job on the city’s south side by 8 a.m. has become difficult under the new schedule. She described the city’s on-demand ride service as unreliable.

“If you call Santa Fe Trails and complain you cannot get to work on time because of a schedule change you will discover you are talking to people who think you should change your work schedule to accommodate the bus schedule,” she wrote in an email.

In an environment where the division is trying to “do more with less,” Baca said it has to be strategic about which routes it operates.

Baca said ridership is within 15% of prepandemic levels but has not completely bounced back, something true of most transit agencies in New Mexico. Current ridership hovers around 30,000 a month, with the overwhelming majority of riders on Route 2, which travels along the Cerrillos Road corridor. The division has been working on plans to create a new “microtransit” system, which would likely replace all routes except Routes 1 and 4.

Under the new system, different areas in the city would be split up into geofenced zones. Large buses would have routes along the perimeter while smaller “cutaway” vehicles would be able to take people to locations inside each zone on scheduled trips, including on streets that would not be navigable on larger buses. People would be able to move between zones at transfer stations.

Several cutaway vehicles have been ordered and the division is in the process of ordering another. Plans for the system are largely in place. But in order to start out, more drivers are needed.

Baca, who started out as a trainee bus driver at the division nearly seven years ago, said he believes people will fall in love with the job the way he did if they just try it out.

“We just need drivers,” he said. “… Once they get in here, they realize, ‘Oh, we like it.’ And then they stay. But we’ve got to get them in here first.”

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