EASTHAMPTON — A months-long debate on how the city would negotiate the financial impacts of upcoming changes to municipal health care came to a resolution on Wednesday.
Standing side-by-side with members of public sector unions and the city’s retirement board, Mayor Nicole LaChapelle formally withdrew a request made to the City Council to adopt a law intended to help municipalities negotiate the rising costs of health care. In January, LaChappelle asked the council to adopt a 2011 law that would allow the city to negotiate with a single committee as opposed to the city’s bargaining units, which include teachers, police, firefighters and public works employees.
“The city has reached individual agreements with each of the city’s unions,” LaChapelle said. “It is unnecessary for the city to adopt” the proposed law.
Higher out-of-pocket expenses for municipal employees are set to take effect on July 1, and under collective bargaining law, the city must negotiate how those expenses can be mitigated. Rising co-payments and deductibles, which are set by the Hampshire County Group Insurance Trust, were not on the table, but rather how the city could ease the burden of higher costs for city employees.
“We are getting a portion of savings we are rightfully due and, hopefully, folks will use those savings to mitigate increases of out-of-pocket costs because they are going to increase significantly next fiscal year,” Nellie Taylor Donohue, president of the city’s teacher union, said.
The trust purchases insurance for Easthampton and other municipalities and will soon require higher co-pays and deductible from its subscribers and those price increases cannot be changed by unions.
Instead, the city and union leaders came to an agreement April 8 on how to mitigate those increases, according to Taylor. LaChapelle met with a coalition of the city’s bargaining units, retirement board and pay plan employees, and within 2½ hours, came to an agreement that was ratified by all bargaining units in the city.
“We preserved collective bargaining rights of all union members of the city,” Taylor said. “We also used the leverage of union membership to include retirees and pay plan employees at the table during negotiations, which is not required by law, but we pushed for that because it’s the right thing to do.”
If adopted, the state law would have created a public employees committee, representing all the bargaining units, that would have 30 days to negotiate the mitigation of increases to co-payments for medical services. If an agreement could not be reached within those 30 days, negotiations would have gone before a three-person review panel.
Luis Fieldman can be reached at lfieldman@gazettenet.com