Hill County Commission to discuss employee health insurance costs

The Hill County Commission may make a decision at their weekly business meeting Thursday about whether or not to raise county contributions to employee health care plans to cover a 6.5 percent rate increase by the Montana Association of Counties, through which county employees get their health issuance.

The commissioners have said this increase from MACo seems like a result of the pandemic and the lack of elective procedures done during that time, as well as the increased demand for them as the pandemic appears to be less and less severe.

MACo Communications Director Shantil Siaperas said The MACo Health Care Trust operates utilizing member dues, and as a result of their efficient use of these dollars, they’ve managed to keep premium increases relatively low over the past several years.

“For the previous two years, Hill County did not have an increase in rates, resulting in just over a 3 percent increase over the course of three years compared to the national average of 8 percent,” she said in an email earlier this week. “The county’s current quote for medical and pharmacy coverage is based on claims history as well as medical inflation and continues to be below the industry average.”

Regardless of the reason for the increase the county’s insurance committee recommended last week that the county absorb this 6.5 percent increase, which would otherwise see many county employees paying substantially more every month.

Based on data compiled by insurance committee member Bridget Kallenberger, employees would see their contributions rise by between $37 and $197 if the county sticks with their current contribution, depending on the employee’s plan.

The commission did not take an official position on the committee’s request last week and Hill County Commissioner Mark Peterson said Tuesday that he doesn’t know what they are going to do yet, either.

Commissioner Jake Strissel, in an email Tuesday, said the commission is looking at its options.

“We have been receiving feedback from county employees and community members that have weighed in on the situation. Our position is we, as a commission, need to do right by county employees while also being fiscally responsible to county taxpayers.”

The email said everyone is getting hit hard with inflation on all fronts, from gas to groceries and a 6.5 percent increase in our health care costs in the middle of it all is hurtful.

“Difficult decisions such as these require in-depth analysis. What is the ripple effect to the overall county budget if we were to raise the county contribution to meet the increase? Do we need to pass a permissive levy in order to make that happen? These questions are what we, as a commission, have been deliberating,” Strissel said in the email.

Strissel’s email said dealing with the issue needs to be a team effort and he’s thankful for the insurance committee as well as other departments’ input.

Hill County Treasurer Sandy Brown said the increase could be covered with the permissive levy the county already has, which would not require the public to vote on it.

She said she didn’t have numbers on how that would affect taxes, and Hill County Clerk and Recorder Sue Armstrong, who Brown said would be able to find that out, was not available for comment this week.

Despite the lack of a firm position on the issue, two of the three commissioners, Peterson and Diane McLean, were resistant to the idea of absorbing the costs at last week’s meeting, arguing that perhaps taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay the price for this increase.

These arguments appear not to have gone over well with many county employees, who say that not only is this a substantial expense to them, it takes away from one of the big selling points of working at the county, their benefits package.

Employees, including members of the insurance committee, one of whom said she took her job over one that paid better because of the health insurance, have touted the package as one of the ways the county attracts workers despite their lower wages.

Wages have been a major concern of many employees who say this rise in their insurance costs amounts to, effectively, a pay cut offsetting any recent increases in pay they say already weren’t great.

Employees push back

Among the employees concerned about this issue is Shane Huston, a county road department employee who said many of the people he works with are very worried about what could happen to their insurance rates, which he said look poised to go up by around $100 a month if the county doesn’t increase their contribution or cover the rate increase.

Huston said no one gets into public service expecting to get rich, but even taking that expectation into account, the pay at Hill County is not great, and, in light of that fact, he doesn’t understand the resistance to absorbing the costs.

“I don’t know what people are thinking, to be real honest with you,” he said.

He said the justification for their low wages is very often that the county offers such substantial health benefits, but the moment the wage discussion ends health insurance becomes the next thing employees like him have to worry about.

He said he understands that the county wants to be good stewards of taxpayers’ money, but it doesn’t seem like covering this increase would be that dramatic a cost, and expecting the employees, many of whom are struggling with inflation just like everyone else, to pick up the tab is wrong.

“We go to the fuel store too, and, at the end of the day, we’re also taxpayers,” Huston said.

He said the county already has a permissive levy to cover things like this and he doesn’t think it would be a huge burden on taxpayers, but could be a massive burden on himself and his fellow employees.

Another county employee, and insurance committee member who’s been outspoken on the issue is Jim Litzinger who said he’s not in as bad a position as many others.

However, he said, Hill County is one entity, everyone works together, and even for those that have little contact with each other, what affects one department will inevitably have effects on the others.

A repeating pattern

Huston and Litzinger both said this isn’t the only issue they’ve had to fight for as Hill County employees, and, in fact, it feels as if they’re constantly having to deal with some new issue that takes time and energy to solve, time and energy they could put toward doing the job they were hired and are paid for.

“We talk about it all the time,” Huston said. “It feels like there’s always something coming down the pipe that needs to be dealt with.”

He said this feeling of constantly having to fight to keep doing their jobs has created an incredibly stressful working environment for him and his fellow employees, and he’d like to be able to work without wondering if he needs to attend some meeting where a decision is going to be made that negatively affects him and his livelihood.

“It’d be nice to be able to come to work and actually go do your job without having to worry about what’s coming next,” he said.

Litzinger put his feelings in more explicit terms, citing the current commission specifically as the apparent cause of a great deal of tension within the county’s various employee groups, saying it so often feels like it’s the commission against the departments.

“And it shouldn’t be that way,” he said.

Litzinger and Huston said while this pattern of conflict has been consistent, this particular situation feels very close to another that happened just two years ago when the commission, then made up of McLean, Peterson and Mike Wendland, proposed a budgetary line-item decision that would have shifted the amounts paid for health insurance by county employee, who also insured a spouse, children or family to the employee.

The proposal would have had employees paying an increased amount for their insurance and the county paying less in an effort to reduce the taxes of the larger community.

A document provided by the Hill County Clerk and Recorder’s Office at the time showed a taxpayer who owns a home with a market value of $200,000 would only see savings of $7.09 per year, which many argued could not justify the degree to which employee shares were raised.

The shift would have increased the cost to some employees by several hundred dollars a month.

After heavy opposition to the proposal, the commission voted it down.

This proposed change was criticized by county employees including Hill County Public Health Director Kim Berg, then Kim Larson, who said she’d heard fellow employees tell her that the proposed increase could cause them to quit.

Berg had also criticized the way the commission handled informing her and her fellow employees about the proposal, which she heard about the Tuesday before the commissioners were going to vote on it that Thursday.

During last week’s meeting Berg, a member of the insurance committee, again pushed back on the commission’s apparent resistance to the insurance committee’s recommendation to absorb the costs of the increase.

“I am the highest-paid public health official that we have and I don’t make a living wage,” she said last week, “ ... and now I have no say in a pay cut that I will get because I have to pay more for health insurance.”

In an email Tuesday she said she hopes the commission makes the right decision and recognizes the value of their employees, who remain the county’s greatest asset, one that should be cared for.

Huston was also critical of the commission’s move two years ago and said having to deal with a similar situation two years later is extremely frustrating, especially since the people he works with only found out about the issue recently.

Litzinger said the attempted change two years ago resulted in an influx of taxpayers telling the commission that they weren’t interested in such a small tax reduction if it meant county employees would pay such a substantial price.

Indeed, the proposed change two years, while not without defenders, was met with substantial opposition from the public, though unfortunately some of that opposition came in the form of vitriolic messages and social media posts the commissioners said were hyperbolic and unjustified.

Litzinger said he understands where the commission is coming from, looking out for the taxpayers, but effectively increasing the insurance costs for employees runs the risk of hurting the county’s employee retention, and the costs involved in training new people, especially at his department, are substantial and that will also cost taxpayers.

He, like many last week, said the commission needs to understand that county employees are in the same position as everyone else when it comes to things like inflation, and they need help.

“Everyone has a bottom line,” he said. “ ... You gotta make a living.”

Possible solutions

Litzinger said, at this point in the game, it’s not really possible to shop around for new insurance plans for the county’s next fiscal year, but as far as he can tell the county could cover the 6.5 percent through their current permissive levy while the committee begins work on shopping around for the following year. That way the county would only need to cover one year of the increased costs.

During last week’s meeting, Peterson said this was something the committee should have been doing for this year, but members of the committee pushed back on that, saying that the committee wasn’t formed just for this issue, but to deal with insurance-related matters generally and they’ve had to deal with a number of issues.

They also said they weren’t aware of the 6.5 percent increase from MACo until very recently, making it hard to shop around when they don’t know what their options really were.

Litzinger said he only found out he was on the committee a few weeks ago and being told two weeks in advance of the deadline for a decision to be made is pretty frustrating.

The matter of the permissive levy has also been a point of contention between members of the committee and the commissioners, who questioned whether they would need to go to voters for the money necessary to cover the 6.5 percent and whether voting would support it.

Hill County Treasurer Sandy Brown said the permissive levy should be able to cover the costs of the increase and would not require a vote from the public.

Brown and other members of the committee have said this kind of thing is exactly what the permissive levy is for.

Huston said no one likes tax increases, but it doesn’t seem like getting the funds necessary to cover the insurance rate increase through the permissive levy would be particularly burdensome to taxpayers.

In theory, he said, the county could lay off staff or stop hiring for certain positions, but that would result in less service to the public and he questions if that’s something taxpayers would want.

“This shouldn’t even be an issue with the permissive levy,” he said.

Regardless, he said, with the state of the labor market today not absorbing these costs and passing them on to employees will make it hard to find people willing to work for the county.

“At some point, people aren’t going to be able to afford to work for Hill County,” he said.