Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson is moving forward with a plan to provide medical and dental benefits for domestic partners, sans City Council approval.

After seeking legal advice from City Attorney Ed Rutan, Anderson said Tuesday he believes he can administratively offer medical and dental benefits to domestic partners. In a strange legal twist, however, Anderson said it looks like he cannot administratively offer them bereavement benefits.

The mayor, then, plans to pass an executive order offering medical and dental benefits to domestic partners and seek council approval for the rest.

"What I'm hoping is that I can structure this under the executive order in terms of exactly who will be covered under these benefits and then ask the council to provide bereavement and dependent leave for that same group," Anderson said.

"Exactly who will be covered" has become a bit of a bone of contention between the council and the mayor.

Tuesday Anderson met with Councilwoman Jill Remington Love and out of that meeting Love said she agrees that Anderson can give benefits to domestic partners without seeking council approval.

"Ultimately I think it is an administrative function," she said. "Today when I met with the mayor I just urged him to go ahead and do it."

Love and Anderson had been separately looking into giving benefits to domestic partners for some time now.

Love, along with other council members, had wanted to extend benefits to a wide group of people living together who were not married. That way, siblings, parents and children and those in other domestic relationships would be given benefits similar to those enjoyed by married couples.

Anderson, on the other hand, wants to only extend benefits to non-married couples, largely homosexual, who aren't currently afforded the same benefits as married couples.

"What we're trying to reach here is equality for our employees without regard to sexual orientation. I don't think we need to open this up to include the whole universe," he said. "To include the universe, sisters living together, employees living with parents, that sort of thing, would avoid the issue of equality without regard to sexual orientation."

And while Anderson won't need council approval to offer medical and dental benefits to gay couples, he said he would like the council to to pass a resolution supporting the executive order he plans to issue in the near future.

"I would like to do this in a unified way with the council," he said. "If they could issue a joint statement or a resolution in support of this, I think that would be a terrific thing to the community."

Love is at least one who would support Anderson's move. Others on the council are less sure, saying they would rather open the policy up to a broader range of relationships, not just non-married couples.

A report, conducted by the Public Employees Health Program for Salt Lake City's Department of Human Resources, shows that extending health benefits to domestic partners would cost the city between $38,000 and $113,000. The city maintains an annual general fund of $170 million and a total budget of more than $660 million.

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