City workers to testify for registry

Gathered with family members in a hospital room in January 2006, Melanie Schertz made her dying father a promise: "It's OK," she recalls saying. "I'll take care of Mom."

Today, Schertz credits Salt Lake City for enabling her to keep that promise. Thanks to an ordinance approved by the City Council a month after the sudden and unexpected loss of her father, Schertz was able to share her health insurance benefits with her mother.

The ordinance prevented the family from being financially devastated later that year, Schertz said, when her mother suffered a serious fall, fracturing the upper palate in her mouth, knocking out a tooth and sustaining a concussion.

"If she had no insurance whatsoever, we would have been done," Schertz said. "We would have lost everything."

Schertz will be among the Salt Lake City employees at the Capitol on Monday sharing their personal stories with state legislators about how they've benefited from the city's "adult designee" ordinance.

Schertz and others want to show support for the creation of a citywide domestic-partnership registry, an action unanimously approved by the City Council last week. Proposed by Mayor Ralph Becker, the registry provides a mechanism by which other Salt Lake City employers can voluntarily extend heath benefits to their employees' adult designees — including gay couples, siblings, long-term roommates and parents.

"In this day and age, the typical family structure is not like it was 20 years ago," said Schertz, a crime-lab technician for the Salt Lake City Police Department. "People have to be together to survive."

Beginning at 8 a.m. Monday, the Senate Health and Human Services Committee will be considering SB267, which seeks to stop or invalidate such registries and the recognition of domestic partnerships other than those created by marriage.

The bill's sponsor, Sen. Chris Buttars, R-West Jordan, has called Salt Lake City's action "wrong," contending that it violates the letter and spirit of both the state's constitutional amendment and state code limiting marriage to a man and a woman.

Schertz says legislators who oppose the city's action are focusing too much on "the gay issue, when it's not just a gay issue."

"They have blinders on," she said.

According to the Salt Lake City mayor's office, 78 percent of city employees who have utilized the adult-designee provision are not same-sex couples. In addition, 10 percent of those employees have named their mothers as their adult designees.