San Antonio Water System’s board of trustees signed off on a $94,000 bonus for President and CEO Robert Puente Tuesday as part of the deferred compensation package it approved for him in 2021.
Puente’s base pay is $516,381. It was last raised by 4% in 2020 from $496,520.
Puente, who became the head of SAWS in 2008, will have to stay on as the leader of the water utility for two more years before he can access his bonus funds. A bonus of more than $100,000 the board approved for Puente last year is also deferred, said chairwoman Jelynne LeBlanc Jamison.
“The board is very pleased with his performance,” LeBlanc Jamison told the San Antonio Report Tuesday. “We continue to present him and his staff with stretch goals with an eye on making sure we have affordable rates for our customers, making sure that our systems are reliant, and in compliance with all of our regulatory requirements, and they continue to meet or exceed many of those goals.”
According to his annual evaluation by the board, Puente hit about two-thirds of the annual goals SAWS’ board set for him this past year, securing himself a bonus of $94,192. He could have received up to $150,000 maximum, had he hit all the performance goals, LeBlanc Jamison said.
LeBlanc Jamison listed several of the accomplishments SAWS achieved in 2022 under Puente’s leadership, including implementing a new rate structure, maintaining a double A-plus bond rating and improving the system’s resiliency by collaborating with CPS Energy to purchase backup generators for critical pumping stations.
Utility executive pay and bonuses have long been a pain point for some city officials. In 2019, Mayor Ron Nirenberg said he would like to see bonuses for municipally-owned utility officials ended after a San Antonio Report review found that Puente was among the highest-paid public water utility executives in the U.S.
Nirenberg was, however, “fully supportive,” of the board’s contract amendment to Puente’s compensation in 2021 that created the deferred bonus structure, as it helps retain top talent while also being mindful of taxpayer resources.
Puente said Tuesday he doesn’t do this work for the bonus, and in the past, he has turned down bonuses.
In 2020, Puente directed his $100,000 bonus to Project Agua, which provides payment assistance for SAWS customers facing financial emergencies.
While Puente was, by 2019 standards, one of the nation’s highest-paid public water CEO’s, he made significantly less than his CPS Energy counterpart Paula Gold-Williams, who served as president and CEO from 2015 to 2021 and, at the time of her departure, had a base pay of $485,850.
Gold-Williams typically received annual bonuses of more than $400,000 annually. Following her resignation, a KSAT-12 investigation found that Gold-Williams’s final paycheck topped more than $1 million.
CPS Energy suspended executive bonus pay in March 2020 in an effort to show solidarity with customers who were struggling due to the coronavirus pandemic, and canceled $13 million in bonuses that would have gone to 1,800 of the utility’s employees that May.
After naming Rudy Garza president and CEO of CPS Energy in September of last year, the board of trustees set his salary at $655,000 with no bonus pay — however, the wording of his contract left the door open for possible future bonuses.
