EASTHAMPTON — The city may adopt a law that speeds up how the city negotiates health care changes for employees and retirees, but for now, the city’s bargaining units and Mayor Nicole LaChapelle will attempt to hammer out an agreement without the adoption of the law.
LaChapelle has asked the City Council to adopt the law, but its finance subcommittee on Jan. 30 voted to delay the measure. The finance committee will vote on its recommendation at next week’s meeting and the mayor’s proposal will go before the council on Feb. 20.
City Councilor Daniel Rist, who is chairman of the finance subcommittee, requested that city officials and representatives of the bargaining units reach an agreement that would protect the city from grievances being filed and set the parameters for negotiating costs created by health plan changes.
“I’ve heard that there is a possibility that an agreement could be made, that the city attorney and labor attorneys agree is safe, but also protects the city against 150e (collective bargaining) grievances,” Rist said at Wednesday’s meeting. “The City Council, in my opinion, is in a no-win situation here … We as city councilors have an obligation to the fiduciary responsibility of making sure our taxpayers are represented by us. We also have a responsibility to make sure we have labor peace.”
If adopted, the provision under Massachusetts general law states that a public employees committee would be created and, in 30 days, would have to negotiate around the city’s ability to mitigate the impact of upcoming increases to co-payments. Affected city employees include teachers, police, firefighters, pay plan employees and retirees.
Municipal employees of seven departments in Easthampton are members of the Hampshire County Group Insurance Trust, which includes 11,000 active and retired municipal employees in Hampshire, Franklin, Hampden and Worcester counties.
The trust recently announced it will implement higher co-payments for members, effective July 1, that forces the city to negotiate with employees on the impacts of plan changes.
“The mitigation is the difference between what the cost would’ve been without plan design changes versus the cost with the plan design changes,” Melissa Zawadski, the city’s finance director, said at last week’s meeting. “We will have to set aside and budget for the mitigation cost.”
Representatives of city labor unions oppose the adoption of the law and say that their ability to negotiate around the impacts of the health care changes will be heavily curtailed.
Under the law, the city would only have to mitigate up to 25 percent of the estimated savings, and the city would only have to negotiate mitigation for the first year of changes and the net impact in subsequent years.
With health care costs rising “in perpetuity,” Nellie Taylor Donohue, president of the city’s teachers union, said employees would be facing “a functional pay cut” without the ability to negotiate past year one of plan design changes through the collective bargaining process.
LaChapelle and Zawadzki contend that the public employees committee would create parity among all groups — city employees, pay plan employees and retirees — because the seven bargaining units in the city would have more ability to negotiate around mitigation as part of their contract negotiations, which pay plan employees and retirees cannot do as part of the collective bargaining process.
“If you individually negotiate seven different contracts, there is a contract problem and there is different treatment for different groups,” Zawadski said. “I think the fairest way to go is that we all accept the same mitigation, and this is the path to that.”
Rist said the city’s Insurance Advisory Committee would represent the seven bargaining units, along with pay plan employees and retirees, in negotiating a letter that would close off liabilities with the city while paving a way forward to mitigation of plan design costs.
“In my opinion — not that of the finance committee or council — it would be better to have our own committee that represents all of the people that use health care in trying to get the best deal on health care for the city,” Rist said on Tuesday. “With a letter of agreement, it could be renewed in a few years.”
With health care plan changes set to take effect on July 1, the proponents of adopting the state law provision say that the mitigation process would be fair for all members and would provide a path to resolving differences in a more timely fashion before the changes take effect.
In July 2011, then-Gov. Deval Patrick signed An Act Relative to Municipal Health Insurance, which was intended to save cities and towns money by creating a new process to expedite negotiations between municipalities and employees around changes to health insurance plans.
South Hadley and Belchertown, two municipalities that also are part of the Hampshire trust, have also adopted the provisions created under the municipal health insurance law.
Luis Fieldman can be reached at lfiedman@gazettenet.com