Jan. 13—Jimmie Martinez, a former school board member and Santa Fe City Councilor, is being remembered for championing the city’s living wage ordinance.

Martinez, who died on Dec. 24 at age 81, introduced the first iteration of Santa Fe’s ordinance “to require wages and benefits sufficient to ensure a decent and healthy life for workers and their families” with while serving on the City Council between 1998 and 2002. At the time, it was one of the first of its kind in the nation; a version of it is still in effect today.

“He was definitely looking out for the community, always looking out for the little guy,” said Frank Montaño, who served on the City Council with Martinez and helped him introduce the ordinance. “There wasn’t anything that would come up that would be about people that he wouldn’t support. He and I had our differences on some things, but he was definitely a people’s councillor. He really wanted to do good for the average Santa Fesino.”

Martinez initially proposed raising the minimum wage for all employees to about $12 per hour at a time when the federal minimum wage was $6.25 per hour, Montaño said. But he faced opposition on many fronts, including from employers and some fellow policy makers.

Despite the pushback, the council passed a scaled-back version of the ordinance in 2002 which applied at the time only to city workers, increasing their minimum wage to $8.50. The ordinance was later extended to the private sector and currently requires employers to pay workers at least $14.03 per hour.

“I don’t believe he gets enough credit for the living wage ordinance,” Montaño said. “That was huge. At that time Santa Fe was one of only three cities [including New York and San Francisco] that had one. And in my view, it led to the entire nation starting to pay attention to how well people were paid.”

Martinez, the youngest of 10 siblings, was born and raised in Santa Fe, according to an obituary published by his family. He graduated from Santa Fe High School and had been married to Florine Martinez for 63 years at the time of his death. The couple had six children and nearly a dozen grandchildren.

Martinez owned and operated the Quick and Easy gas station for about 30 years and worked as a stocker and manager in the grocery industry for a total of 47 years — including 27 at Safeway and subsequent stints at Furrs and Smiths — according to a recorded interview he gave the University of New Mexico.

For about a decade in the 1990s, he served on the Santa Fe school board, where he advocated for bilingual education and an increase in minority teachers to address low test scores among Hispanic students, saying the system was not responsive to the cultural and familial obligations of Hispanics.

A onetime chairman of the Head Start program for Santa Fe County and an officer in the National Hispanic Caucus to the National School Board Association, Martinez also pushed to have children in the city’s summer recreation programs exposed to fine arts, not just sports.

Martinez “strongly believed the path out of poverty was through education,” and he went back to school late in life, earning a degree in criminal justice at age 58, according to the obituary.

He was a sometimes controversial figure.

A citizens group tried but failed to remove him and two other school board members from office in 1990 after they voted to fire Santa Fe High School football coach Wally Green “without explanation,” according to reports from the time. Martinez had a son on the team and, Green speculated, personal reasons for wanting to get rid of him, including the fact that he was Anglo.

Martinez rejected accusations he was racially biased.

“There’s a misconception that I’m anti-Anglo. but that’s not true,” he told The New Mexican at the time. “I’m just very pro-Santa Fe. In seeking people for jobs, rather than always seeking someone from the outside, I’m for giving it to people from Santa Fe. It seems we’re always short in coming up with people from Santa Fe for supervisory positions.”

Montaño described Martinez as upbeat, friendly and a man with vision.

“He was very much a progressive,” Montaño said. “He wanted to do good things and things that helped people. Santa Fe really lost a good person.”

Martinez’s funeral Mass was held Tuesday at St. Anne Parish. Mourners were asked to donate to the Interfaith Community Shelter at Pete’s Place on Cerrillos Road in lieu of bringing flowers.