A dispute between UNM and members of its police department will be settled in the state Supreme Court.
"The University failed to pay the police officers their proper wages under the collective bargaining agreement," Judge Ira Robinson wrote in the Court of Appeals opinion, which upheld a 2000 ruling in favor of the Police Officer's Association at UNM.
"That's what started the whole thing," said Jimmie White, president of the officers union. "Officers were asking for raises to be compatible with APD."
On April 23 the state Supreme Court agreed to evaluate the case, though a final court date has not yet been set.
The union set the suit in motion in 1997 after the University did not satisfy officers' requests to reconsider their wages.
The union had reached an agreement with UNM regarding wages based on UNM Pact. The pact, a study organized to examine University employees' wages, determined an officer's pay should be increased to $13.68 per hour - the starting pay in 1997 for an Albuquerque Police Department officer.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
Starting pay for an officer at UNM is still around $12 an hour - a rate White said means a lot of turnover in the department.
"Because of pay, it's hard to keep officers here," he said. "We've gone through 48 officers in seven years."
UNM has on average 23 officers, though the University authorizes a 40-man department, White said. He said he's never seen more than 26 officers at UNM during his six years with the department, mostly because of budget considerations.
"There's a manpower shortage," White said. "When things are really busy here, we don't have enough people to handle the calls. People have to wait. If we had 30 police officers, we could probably handle anything and everything that comes through the University."
In 2000, Judge Robert Scott ruled the University should pay the officers $224,588 in back pay dating back to when the agreement was signed.
But the heart of the matter is whether a contract that relied partially on oral information is something UNM can be sued over, said Edward Ricco, one of the attorneys representing the University.
That argument, along with the contention that the officer's union didn't try to remedy the situation before bringing it to court, was the basis for the first appeal.
"Our argument was the police association had remedies within the University's process that they didn't run to exhaustion before they filed suit," he said.
White said a lack of communication is really what caused the problem to begin with.
"The process failed because both parties weren't talking to each other," he said. "I just hope an agreement of some sort comes out of it, either by legal opinion, or if we could sit down and talk."
