From Deseret News archives:
Death of bill may free up expanded insurance in Salt Lake
Various city officials have worked since last summer to bring insurance benefits to unmarried dependents of city employees — and a busy last night at the 2006 legislative session kept lawmakers from finalizing a bill from Rep. LaVar Christensen, R-Draper, that would have restricted how the city offered that insurance.
Christensen's bill threatened to gut the City Council's plan to offer insurance to adult designees of city employees — a category that could include roommates, friends, parents or adult siblings as long as the employee and the designee have long-standing joint financial obligations.
The council's benefits plan supersedes an older executive order from Mayor Rocky Anderson, who wanted the benefits only for domestic partners of city employees. After a lawsuit challenged Anderson's order, the city delayed enrolling employees for the insurance pending the outcome of the lawsuit.
In the meantime, Anderson vetoed the council's plan, saying that it dodged addressing discrimination; the council overrode his veto but delayed offering the benefits to see what the Legislature would do.
Wednesday night, Salt Lake City Council members successfully lobbied legislators to keep control of how the city administers insurance benefits. A Senate amendment with a few hours left in the session removed wording from Christensen's bill that would have prohibited any public money from funding the additional insurance for nontraditional dependents of city employees. The Senate sent the amended bill back to the House of Representatives for a vote on the amendment, but time ran out before representatives saw the bill again.
"There was just an awful amount of pressure because there were so many important decisions to be made," Christensen said. "I wasn't at all close-minded to the essence of the amendment."
The City Council members pushed for the amendment thinking that the Legislature would pass the final bill. Since that ultimately wasn't the case, Council Chairman Dave Buhler thinks that the city's insurer, PEHP, ought to start enrolling people.
"We don't really need their blessing," Buhler said of the Legislature. "Now PEHP needs to provide the coverage."
It's not that simple, though, said David Hansen, a lawyer for PEHP. The insurer sought a judge's ruling on whether Anderson's order was legal, and it now has until Wednesday to request the same ruling on the council's ordinance.
"We have the same problems with the City Council's plan that we had with the mayor's plan," Hansen said. "We'd like to have a ruling before we start administering those benefits — it becomes very difficult to fix things after the fact."
Salt Lake City's human resources department hasn't acted on enrolling people — it, too, was waiting for the end of the Legislature before taking any action on the council's plan, said Jamey Knighton, acting head of the department.
E-mail: kswinyard@desnews.com
