The City of El Paso announced it will increase the minimum wage for non-uniform employees beginning in March.
It is being increased by 0.50 cents which would bring the current wage from $11.61 to $12.11 hourly.
Last year the City of El Paso raised its wages by $1 which helped hire 2,067 non-uniform positions however the city still has 1,170 vacancies, according to Laura Cruz Acosta, the city’s media spokesperson.
KFOX14 spoke to El Pasoans to get their opinions about the 0.50 cent increase.
The majority said they do not believe $12.11 is a liveable wage for El Paso.
“I think people should be paid more because everything is increasing in price, the gas, taxes everything and I think a lot of times people only have enough for their essentials,” Rubi Mesa said.
“Given the high cost of living, and the current inflation I don’t think that is enough,” Noemi Gonzalez said.
“It’s still too little for people, since everything is rising, businesses everything,” Oscar Velasquez said.
One El Pasoan added she’s happy to see the city take steps towards addressing the wages and believes it could work based on a person's needs.
“It goes to see whether or not you’re a single income household, if you’re just a single individual without supporting kids, or a family or even pets, I think it could be liveable depending on how you budget yourself and stuff like that,” Sierra Moore said.
In an interview with City Representative for District 4 Joe Molinar, he agreed the increase is not a liveable wage for the city.
“No I don’t believe $12.11 is a liveable wage for the City of El Paso, it needs to be much higher however how do we pay for that, to me you need to do it in increments," he said.
Molinar added he will continue to push his fellow council members to increase the wages in a way that does not highly impact the overall budget.
“We need to take a good solid approach on how we do this and make sure we’re doing it well and yes, we probably don’t want to do it every 6 months, maybe we can do it every 4 months but we need to look at the figures, we need to look at the date, we need to make sure we’re doing the right things for the employees, for the community which they serve," Molinar said.
Lastly, Molinar said people need to look not only at the wages, but also the additional benefits that come with working with the city.
Some benefits for city employees include paid time off, tuition assistance programs, flexible schedules, quality training and wellness programs.
Cruz Acosta provided the following statement:
We know our minimum wage is not where it should be. This is why we have been working over the last several years to increase it (minimum wage). We will continue to discuss how we can address our minimum wage this year and in future years with the Council members during our year-round budget process.
District 8 Rep. Chris Canales said he would like the city to increase the minimum wage more and is looking to work on a solution to offer a higher pay to employees.
The $0.50/hour increase that was discussed during the City Council meeting had been previously announced last calendar year — it was only discussed again yesterday as part of a broader overview presentation on the City workforce. This is the second $0.50 increase of this fiscal year, and I do think it is appropriate for the City to increase the minimum wage by $1.00/year until we reach a more livable wage of $15 per hour. The City unfortunately can’t do the full increase overnight — our budget growth is capped at 3.5% per year by state law. Each $0.50 wage increase costs the approximately $4.9 million dollars annually in the budget," Canales stated in an email.
As I said in the Council meeting yesterday, I plan to introduce something very soon that would commit the City to reaching a $15/hr minimum wage over the next couple of years, which I think is a reasonable and achievable goal.
We reached out to all city representatives, only some got back to us in time for this report.
Count on us to update this story when we hear back.
We reached out to all city representatives, only some got back to us in time for this report.
Count on us to update this story when we hear back.
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