That’s the county’s 50% contribution for every employee under the Cafeteria Benefit Plan.

 

Last week during a discussion with Human Resources Director Roxanne Chmielewski, the Sherburne County Board debated for about 20 minutes before voting to increase that contribution by 4.25% for 2015.

 

Since 2001, Sherburne County has had a defined contribution to its benefit plan where every employee receives the same amount of money regardless of their personal coverage choice or their individual family situation. Very few counties have that type of plan.

 

“Unfortunately, health insurance premiums have increased dramatically, 124% since 2001,” said Chmielewski. “The employer contribution has not increased that much and the result has been that what employees need to pay for family coverage is approaching unaffordable.” 

 

Currently, the county contributes $833.66 per month for each of its 612 employees and their families. It’s been that amount since 2011.

 

In 2012, the county joined a health insurance purchasing pool called LOGIS with Morrison and Blue Earth counties and about 20 Metro area cities.

 

“As a result, we switched from Medica to Blue Cross Blue Shield and had a 24% reduction in health insurance premiums,” said Chmielewski. “We also have rate caps for five years.” 

 

When the premiums dropped 24% in 2012, it looked like everyone would save money. But it didn’t work out that way, said Commissioner Felix Schmiesing.

 

“We were all struggling a few years ago, and we were happy to have that big 24% reduction. I know as a commissioner, we were really excited because it was going to help us and it was going to help our employees,” he said, “We thought that we would be able to split that and we could take part of the savings and the employees would get the benefit of that. But we found we were unable to do that because of union contracts.”

 

Instead, the county’s contribution remained at $833.66 and has stayed that way through this year.

 

Premiums increased 8.50% in 2013, 13.30% in 2014 and will go up another 10.7% in 2015, which means a 32.5% increase since 2012.

Chmielewski said the labor/management Benefits Advisory Committee at its Aug. 11 meeting recommended the county pay half of the 10.7% increase, or 5.35% in 2015, which would bring the monthly contribution to $878.26 per employee.

 

But she said since the county didn’t decrease its contribution when premiums dropped 24%, the board might consider splitting the difference since 2012. 

 

“If you total what the increase has been since then it’s 8.5%. Half is 4.25%, which would result in a monthly contribution of $869.10, for a total annual contribution of about $6.38 million,” she said.

 

Commissioner Ewald Petersen said it sounded like many in the committee, including union representatives, were looking for more from the county.

 

Chmielewski said that is something she would have to deal with.

 

“What you’re doing today is setting the employer contribution for our non-union employees and elected officials,” she said.  “Once you do that I will go to each of the 10 union groups and attempt to negotiate the same amount with them. As long as I’ve been here, which is almost 20 years, it’s all been equal. So I sincerely hope we can maintain that.”

 

Schmiesing made a motion to set the increase at 4.25%, which he felt continued the equal split between the county and its employees. It passed unanimously.

 

“I think we just want to do what we said we were going to do. We want to continue to try to share the gain or the pain,” he said. “We weren’t able to share the gain in 2012, so we want to get back to where we need to be.”