E. Lansing looking at domestic partner benefits

EAST LANSING — The East Lansing City Council on Tuesday night gave permission to city officials to begin negotiating with health care providers for the city on covering the unmarried partners of city employees.

City Manager Ted Staton says the only unresolved issue is whether or not to extend the benefits to dependents of individuals city employees may place on their insurance.

The council is expected to approve the new policies in July along with new health care contracts.

And while the state Civil Service Commission tabled a similar proposal last week, in part because of cost concerns expressed by State. Rep. Rick Jones (R-Grand Ledge), Staton says costs are not an issue.

“This is not a budget breaker initiative,” he said. “Worst case scenario it would be one-tenth of one percent of general fund expenditure.”

The city currently employs 300 people, the council was told Tuesday night. The city pays $4,300 for one person, $10,400 for two people and $12,600 per family for health insurance. If spouses are on an employee’s insurance plan they must pay $1,800 per year toward that plan.

The policy plan would be based on a program designed and implemented by Michigan State University in 2008 after the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that domestic partner benefits were not legal if they were distributed to same-sex couples only. As a result, MSU and other public bodies created an Other Eligible Individuals program to assist employees in covering their partners. The rules to qualify include that the two people not be related, that the OEI be over 18, that the two have lived together for at least 18 months and that the OEI designee not have inheritance rights.

The policy has been decades in the making.

The city passed a domestic partner plan for same-sex couples in the early 1990s, but citizens sued. The city settled in a consent decree which allowed the city to offer domestic partner benefits, but only if the partners paid for them. In 2008, the plan was abandoned when the supreme court ruling came down. The city decided to wait to act on the benefit offering until case law was more settled on the 2004 marriage amendment. The settlement came in 2008 with the high court ruling, and the OEI benefits have been determined by Attorney General Mike Cox to be legal.

Staton said he does not think the consent agreement had any legal impact on the OEI plan.

The plan was hailed by Equality Michigan. But there was concern that the city was still debating whether or not to cover dependents of other eligible persons added to the city’s insurance plan.

“East Lansing has already made great strides by acknowledging that Other Eligible Individual programs are necessary to a healthy community,” said Emily Dievendorf, policy director of Equality Michigan. “I hardly believe City Manager Ted Staton would seriously entertain leaving East Lansing children out of the progress East Lansing is achieving. We can’t admit that households need adequate and equal resources to thrive and then exclude half of a family from benefits.”

Nathan Triplett, an East Lansing City Councilmember, said he supported extending the benefit to cover dependent children.

“This needs to be as comparable as what we offer to married employees,” Triplett said during the council’s work session Tuesday night. “This is about equal pay for equal work.”