CITY COUNCIL AGENDA 10/24/11, Part 8 B. Personnel

[AQUAMAN]

1) Adopt MERS Lower Defined Benefit Plan for new hirees on 6/1/11 and after. So you ask, what's this new plan about? Well, the COL currently spends over $900/mo. for employee health insurance per employee, that's about $11,000/yr. for an average family of four. After passage, that will now decrease to about $700/mo..Don't worry, if your spouse has insurance already, you'll get a side benefit from the COL to use their insurance as your primary, and drop the COL coverage. That payoff amounts to about $5,000/yr. so you can pay co-pays and deductibles. If you're young/not sick/ don't cash any of that in, you get it rolled over and keep collecting it till you retire. Hmmm, if a 25 year old didn't use this much after 10 years service into retirement, could result in a nice windfall of $500K, double that for 20 years in your retirement account, pretty nice if you ask me. The alternate plan the COL has now, or did for older established employed, is to pay the primary insurance and give you a perk of $2500/yr. for such deductibles. Well, it's plain to see this new plan saved the city quite a chunk of $$$, but, I just wonder. What is the COL going to do with the savings now to come? Noone said so far. And, how did they ever get into a primary insurer charging that much avg. per month for such a large specialized group of employees to begin with, BC/BS being the provider? Mewonders, how carefully did the Finance Committee shop around for insurance for our public workers to begin with, and why so much? Methinks this may be another case of not accepting enough bidders for a large personnel contract, or perhaps some special people got a lot better deal/insurance policy for themselves by opting to go with BC/BS? What do you think? Thanks.

[XLFD]

I wouldn't be too surprised if the City glommed onto such contracts without shopping.  Someone probably marketed themselves to the proper people in the City Government, and won their favor without the necessity of competition.  The fringe benefits of the typical City worker is out of control.

The wages of the City Manager and his asst. is $132,200 and their fringe benefits are $69,800, that's 53% of salary, the City Clerk's, DPW employees, Economic Development Director, and City Treasurer's similarly have fringes at 53% of wages.  That's incredibly high, and needs to be reduced.

But believe it or not, the Police Department has only 24% of each officer's wage go towards fringes, and the Fire Department has about 10%. 

[Sweater Cows!]

So they get cash they can keep, Am I understanding that correctly?

[Willy]

I think the value to an employee after 10 years would be 50K and not 500K. Although that is still a lot of money. This practice is common in a lot of Governmental districts because if they don't give the employee already covered by another insurance program those dollars that would have gone to them in the form of health care coverage then they would be able cry discrimination for not receiving the same amount of benefits that other employees receive.