By BEN NEARY
NMWF Conservation Director
Low pay for conservation officers has created a crisis at the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish: officers are quitting to work for other agencies and roughly a quarter of districts across the state are vacant.
Some members of the New Mexico State Game Commission are encouraging the general public to contact their state legislators and demand the state address the issue in next year’s legislative budget session.
Col. Robert Griego, head of field operations with the game department, briefed game commissioners Nov. 15 in Albuquerque. Of 102 approved positions in field operations, he told commissioners the game department currently has 22 vacancies in the field.
Greigo showed a map of the state with vacant districts covering much of the state highlighted in red. “This slide just shows how we’re kind of bleeding right now in field ops,” he said.
In addition to the 22 vacancies in the field, there are three other vacant slots in the division, Griego said. He said state personnel officials took away three positions from the game department last year because they had gone chronically unfilled.
Commission Vice Chair Jeremy Vesbach questioned Griego about the lost positions.
“Do we have officer districts that have been vacant so long we’ve essentially lost them?” Vesbach said. “Can you give me more information about that?”
Griego responded that the game department has lost state authority for conservation officer positions in Santa Rosa and Tucumcari as well as an investigator position. He said the department still counts the positions among its current vacancies even though the state has eliminated them.
“We’re hopeful we’re going to be able to get those back,” Griego said of the lost positions. “I think it’s easy to justify the need for them.”
Northeastern New Mexico is particularly hard-hit by vacancies, Griego’s map showed. “You can obviously see in the northeast part of the state, we do have several vacancies and officers are getting run pretty ragged covering that country,” he said.
Vesbach said it’s critical that the game commission address the issue.
“In the field, we’re approaching a one-third vacancy rate,” Vesbach said. “We’re dang near at 30 percent here. This is a crisis, in my opinion.”
Vesbach thanked the officers who are holding on and continuing to work. “But it’s COVID, we have more need than ever out there in the field,” he said.
The New Mexico Conservation Officers Association board issued a statement about the vacancy issue in response to a query from the NMWF.
“The NMCOA is extremely concerned with the current vacancy rate with conservation officers across the state,” the NMCOA board stated.
“Wildlife agencies in adjoining states and other in-state police agencies like NM State Police, Santa Fe PD and APD are paying on average 25 percent more than New Mexico conservation officers receive,” the NMCOA board stated.
“New Mexico conservation officers are required to have at least a bachelor’s degree, while most other agencies do not have that requirement,” the NMCOA board stated. “We are aware that pay is not the only reason officers are leaving this agency, but it is the largest contributing factor in our current recruitment/retention issues. These vacancies create extra workload on the remaining officers, reducing the ability to proactively deter wildlife crimes.”
The game department currently has six trainees at the state law enforcement academy and has hired five more who will start the process of going through recruit school, Griego told commissioners.
“Hopefully we come out the other end with all of those,” Griego told commissioners. But he added that typically one or two recruits will drop out of training at the academy.
In addition to passing physical and psychological tests, recruits must have a college degree before they undergo over 700 hours of law enforcement academy training. It takes about a year from the time a recruit is hired until they can be placed in a district as a certified conservation officer.
Griego said the game department invests about $125,000 in training each recruit before they can be placed in a district.
“We put them in pretty stressful situations, and the design is to get them through successfully,” Griego said of the training. “But at times it washes them out. Not everyone was meant to be in law enforcement. They think they are initially, but usually half way through that program we can determine there are just some, they just don’t have the right personality for it and they will wash out of that program.”
A pay schedule released by the NM State Personnel Office in July states that conservation officer pay ranges from just over $34,000 to just under $50,000 depending on experience.
Speaking after the meeting, Vesbach said, “Our conservation officers in New Mexico are 20 percent lower than our neighboring states in pay, and our biologists and other staff are not far behind, and we need to be more competitive. We’re losing good people.”
Commissioner Jimmy Bates responded to Griego’s presentation by saying the game commission recognizes that there’s a serious pay gap with agency law enforcement.
“I know that legislatively, there’s talk about pay for all state employees, and I think that’s good and that should happen, but that won’t do anything to change the gap,” Bates said. “We’ll still have a gap between game and fish and state police, or other local law enforcement. That’s a significant problem.”
Bates noted that the game department is paying over $120,000 to train conservation officers, “and we continually lose folks because we’re not paying competitively.”
Bates said the game department needs support from advocacy groups and the general public to challenge state legislators to correct the pay gap for conservation officers.
“Because we’re going to continue to chase this problem, and not solve it until we pay our people the way they need to be paid,” he said. “It needs to be competitive. We’ve got to close the gap, and if everyone in the state gets a raise that’s good, but we’ll still have a gap, and we’ll continue to lose our officers to other agencies.”
Commissioner Roberta Salazar-Henry said, “To me it’s really important the investment we make in our officers in the field, and to lose them is just terrible. We need to hang on to as many as we can.”
The game department last year submitted a flat proposed budget to state lawmakers, seeking no increase in spending over the year before. The department receives no money from the state’s General Fund but receives about $20 million a year in hunting and fishing license revenue in addition to federal funds.
At the Nov. 15 meeting, commissioners directed the game department staff to make plans for how it would handle the increase in federal funding it would receive under the pending Recovering America’s Wildlife Act. Sponsored by Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M, and others, the legislation would give the NMDGF approximately $27 million a year as part of a nationwide increase in conservation funds to states and tribes.