Las Cruces City Council decided to move forward with the public led minimum wage ordinance passed in September that will increase the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour by 2017, repealing the other increase the city council passed in June.
Last week, concerns were raised that the first reading of the minimum wage ordinance did not include the 2016, or 2017 wage increases. Mayor Miyagishima stated at the meeting that he did not intend to leave the increases out and encouraged councilors to include them in the December 1st vote. Executive Director of Café, Sarah Nolan says she is pleased the public led ordinance is going through.
“Minimum Wage lives to see another day in Las Cruces,” Nolan said. “It looks as if and the conversation looked like they were going to move on with the September ordinance, repeal the June ordinance as they had stated in their work session. I think we are going to see some amendments from some councilors, however the Mayor has indicated that they want to let the implementation go through.”
The proposed ordinance also includes language allowing the council to review the effect of the increases six months after it is put in place before deciding whether to implement the next phase. Councilor Ceil Levatino says this will help them to make a good decision.
“We are moving ahead, and I think the Mayor is being reasonable and thoughtful in wanting to make sure that we don’t go further with the minimum wage until we know how the first implementation is working,” Levatino said. “We need to gather the information on how it’s impacting our community both positively and negatively.”
Councilor Smith says that the ordinance is still a work in progress and could still see changes including which, if any exemptions are put into place.
‘The amendment process when it goes forward on December 1st could include all kinds of things,” Smith said. “Basically the Mayor was indicating today that he is very amendable to whatever Café is suggesting needs to be done.”
Many of the exemptions are taken from the Fair Labor Standards Act, but additional ones were included like an exemption for any business earning less than $500,000 per year in gross revenues, which Sarah Nolan claims would be more than half of all businesses in Las Cruces.
“Exemptions, I think, are something of the past,” Nolan said. It’s something that was created, and had a lot of bias around race and gender. It’s the 21st century; we want to include as many workers as possible. So we are going to continue to fight for the ordinance as it was written to include as many workers as possible.”
Councilor Nathan Small says he is not opposed to some exemptions.
“I am open to instituting exemptions that make sense for our community,” Small said. “If there is agreement from a wide variety of stakeholders for those.”
Councilor Levatino says she would want to see a uniform list of exemptions or none at all.
“I don’t support the cherry picking,” Levatino said. “We are either going to do the federal exemptions or we are not going to do the federal exemptions, but I don’t think it’s fair to cherry pick.”
Minimum wage exemptions will be discussed at the Council’s work session on November 24th, and the ordinance will be voted on December 1st.
