The City of Santa Fe’s city attorney told the finance committee the office’s FY26 budget is “bare bones” and driven primarily by personnel costs, and she outlined recent staffing increases in legislative support and records-custodian functions and a planned technology transition for public-records requests.

“We're primarily, you're paying for people,” the city attorney said, summarizing that salaries and benefits account for roughly 87% of the office’s budget when positions are filled. She said the office now includes 12 staff (eight attorneys including the prosecutor, three paralegals and an office administrator) and that the largest recent change has been adding records-custodian positions and a policy analyst. The office also supervises discovery collection and coordinates with outside counsel for risk litigation; the city attorney noted that risk counsel contracts are budgeted through the risk management fund rather than the city attorney’s budget.

Records-custodian manager Catherine Garcia Gallegos described cross-training her team to handle police records (Axon body‑worn video and dash‑cam footage), crash reports and other departmental systems, and said the city is onboarding a new records-request management system (GovQA) while phasing out NextRequest. “We cross train… to pull reports, redact videos, pull videos, and provide those to the requesters,” she said; she also described putting crash reports online to reduce repetitive public-records requests.

Several councilors raised concerns about how the city’s 12% “vacancy credit” was applied during budget development. The city attorney and city manager explained the vacancy credit is an accounting assumption intended to reflect historical turnover; they said departments should continue to recruit as normal and that the credit is recognized across funds. The city manager told councilors he had asked departments to proceed with hiring and that leaders would present a clearer approach before final budget adoption.

The city attorney said some legal contracts are necessary for specialized work — for example, outside real-estate counsel used for Midtown disposition work (the office expects to amend an existing contract tied to MRA work). She said software and services (Westlaw, records-request platforms) and general-liability assessments make up most non‑personnel costs and that the office will continue to oversee discovery production for litigation and administrative matters.

Committee members asked about staffing and recruiting; the city attorney said the market for attorneys is competitive and that salary differences with the state and county have limited applicant pools. She said the office is exploring limited-term contract help and other internal solutions while management and human resources review compensation and recruitment strategies.