A former deputy to Susana Martinez who made more than $60,000 selling office supplies to the Doña Ana County district attorney's office headed by Martinez also received nearly $24,000 in extra pay from Martinez, now the Republican candidate for governor.

Janetta Hicks, now district attorney in Chaves, Lea and Eddy counties, received two lump-sum "out-of-cycle salary increases" totaling $23,745 in the 2006 and 2007 fiscal years, according to documents obtained by The New Mexican.

Hicks received a lump-sum payment of $11,583 in 2006 and $12,162 the next year. She was one of 12 Martinez employees to get such payments in 2006 and one of 10 in 2007. Hicks, now a Carlsbad resident, was elected district attorney of the Fifth Judicial District in 2008.

She didn't return a phone call Tuesday.

Martinez has campaigned heavily against alleged corruption and cronyism in the Bill Richardson administration. The no-bid purchases from an employee and the lump-sum payments don't contradict that message, Ryan Cangiolosi, Martinez's campaign manager, said in an e-mail on Tuesday.

"Out-of-cycle salary increases are not bonuses, but rather annual salary adjustments based on additional caseload, responsibility and performance," he said. "Every one of these increases was unanimously approved by the Personnel Review Board.

"With respect to Janetta Hicks, she headed the DWI prosecution unit in the district attorney's office until 2007," Cangiolosi said. "In the last decade, DWI prosecutions quadrupled and Hicks helped lead that effort." He noted that Las Cruces law-enforcement agencies were honored by Richardson, who presented them with a "Drunkbusters" award in 2006. The governor was quoted in a 2006 Las Cruces Sun-News article saying, "... we're starting to win the fight on DWI in New Mexico, and the best county is Doña Ana."

"Susana Martinez recognized the success and increased caseload and Hicks received out-of-cycle salary increases as a result, as did other prosecutorial staff whose caseloads and responsibilities increased," he said.

Between the 2006 and 2009 fiscal years, Martinez awarded employees about $477,000 in "out-of-cycle salary increases." About three-fourths of that was from a federal program called the Southwest Border Prosecution Initiative, the Martinez campaign said. Of that money, about $228,000 went to lump-sum payments while the remainder went to salary increases.

Last week, The Albuquerque Journal reported that an office-supply company owned by Hicks was paid more than $60,000 by Martinez's office for supplies between 2003 and 2005. There was no contract for the sales and the office did not put the office-supply purchases out to bid.

Martinez told the paper that buying bulk from Hicks' company enabled the office to save money on supplies.

She said the no-bid for supplies arrangement was cleared with a lawyer in the Secretary of State's Office and the payments were approved by the state Department of Finance and Administration. Martinez said sometime after 2005 the state provided purchase cards so her office could buy supplies in retail stores.

In 2007, the Legislature passed and the governor signed changes to the state Government Conduct Act, including a prohibition against public employees selling goods to the agency that employs them.

When asked whether Denish believes that salaries in the Third Judicial District DA's office should not have been raised and whether those salaries should go back to previous levels, Denish campaign spokesman Chris Cervini said, "What's inappropriate here is that Susana Martinez allowed a high-ranking, highly paid employee to personally profit off of her service in the DA's office. And to top it off, she received fat bonuses. If that's how she ran her DA's office, what does that say for how she'd run the state? Diane Denish believes using federal border money to give employees fat bonuses is a poor use of those funds. Especially with so many other DAs' offices and law enforcement entities feeling the pinch."

But Ernesto Ortiz, director of the High Intensity Drug Traffic Area in New Mexico, said Tuesday that using Southwest Border Prosecution Initiative funds to give raises to prosecutors is legitimate.

The funds, he said, are available to district attorneys in border states. Some district attorneys have used the funds for salaries, while others have used funds for such things as training and equipment, he said.

Contact Steve Terrell at 986-3037 or sterrell@sfnewmexican.com. Read his political blog at roundhouseroundup.com