Changes to the retirement system include: (1) increasing the pension contribution of command officer members to 6% from 5%; (2) implementing a pick-up feature as permitted by the Internal Revenue Code for the pension contributions of firefighters and command officers, converting their 6% pre-tax contribution to a 6% post-tax contribution; (3) increasing the vesting and final average compensation requirements for firefighters hired after July 1, 2012; and (4) implementing a federal provision that allows eligible retired public safety officers to pay qualified health insurance premiums directly from their pensions.

The change to the retiree health care system stipulates that new hires after July 1, 2012 will be eligible for an access-only health care plan at the time of their retirement, instead of a city-paid retiree health care plan.

This brief was filed from the city council’s chambers on the second floor of city hall, located at 301 E. Huron. A more detailed report will follow: [link]

The 9-1 vote included dissent by Alicia Ping, who said she preferred funds to go directly to services, not for administrative purposes. Rob Turner was absent. Initial approval was given by the board at their March 21 meeting on an 8-1 vote, also with dissent from Ping. Barbara Bergman had been absent and Ronnie Peterson was out of the room when the vote was taken at that meeting.

The board has been briefed on the initiative, most recently at a Feb. 16, 2012 working session. The plan is intended to help local health care providers handle an influx of an estimated 50,000 newly insured patients when federal health care reforms take effect in 2014. The goal is to develop a plan to provide better health care for the county’s low-income residents, the uninsured and people on Medicaid – prior to changes that will be mandated by the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

The WHI is a collaboration co-chaired by former county administrator Bob Guenzel and retired University of Michigan treasurer Norman Herbert. The effort is jointly sponsored by the UM Health System and Saint Joseph Mercy Health System, and faciliated by Marianne Udow-Phillips, director of the Center for Healthcare Research & Transformation – a joint venture of UM and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan.

Other partners involved in the project include the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Regional Chamber of Commerce, Arbor Hospice, Catholic Social Services, Dawn Farm, Hope Clinic, Huron Valley Ambulance, Integrated Health Associates, Packard Health, Planned Parenthood of Mid and South Michigan, United Way of Washtenaw County, and the Women’s Center of Southeastern Michigan.

Organizers say they hope this initiative will become a model for other communities nationwide that are facing similar issues.

This brief was filed from the boardroom of the county administration building, 220 N. Main in Ann Arbor. A more detailed report will follow: [link]

The 8-1 vote at the board of commissioners’ March 21, 2012 meeting included dissent from Alicia Ping, who said she preferred funds to go directly to services, not for administrative purposes. Barbara Bergman was absent and Ronnie Peterson was out of the room when the vote was taken. Final approval is expected at the board’s April 4 meeting.

The board has been briefed on the initiative, most recently at a Feb. 16, 2012 working session. The plan is intended to help local health care providers handle an influx of an estimated 50,000 newly insured patients when federal health care reforms take effect in 2014. The goal is to develop a plan to provide better health care for the county’s low-income residents, the uninsured and people on Medicaid – prior to changes that will be mandated by the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

The WHI is a collaboration co-chaired by former county administrator Bob Guenzel and retired University of Michigan treasurer Norman Herbert, who both attended the March 21 meeting, along with Ellen Rabinowitz, executive director of the Washtenaw Health Plan. The effort is jointly sponsored by the UM Health System and Saint Joseph Mercy Health System, and faciliated by Marianne Udow-Phillips, director of the Center for Healthcare Research & Transformation – a joint venture of UM and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan.

Other partners involved in the project include the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Regional Chamber of Commerce, Arbor Hospice, Catholic Social Services, Dawn Farm, Hope Clinic, Huron Valley Ambulance, Integrated Health Associates, Packard Health, Planned Parenthood of Mid and South Michigan, United Way of Washtenaw County, and the Women’s Center of Southeastern Michigan.

Organizers say they hope this initiative will become a model for other communities nationwide that are facing similar issues.

This brief was filed from the boardroom of the county administration building, 220 N. Main St. in Ann Arbor. A more detailed report will follow: [link]

The contract with Local 693 of the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) is retroactive to July 1, 2010 and runs through June 30, 2014. Ann Arbor’s firefighters have been working without a new contract since the previous agreement expired June 30, 2010. Features of the new contract include the restoration of pay to the 2008 level – the union had previously accepted a wage decrease of 3% in order temporarily to preserve jobs. The restoration to previous wage levels will take place over the course of two years, at 1.5% each year.

The contract reduces the food allowance for firefighters, who work 24-hour shifts. The contract also includes a change in the firefighters’ schedule to increase the average number of hours worked from 50.4 to 54. Health care provided under the contract meets the new state mandated hard caps on health care contributions by public employers.

The new contract with the Command Officers Association of Michigan runs retroactively from July 1, 2009 to June 30, 2013. The command officers have been operating without a contract since the expiration of the previous one.

The health care plan in the contract is similar to the health care offered to non-union city staff, with the state of Michigan’s mandated hard cap on the amount that a public employer can contribute to employees’ health care.

This brief was filed from the city council’s chambers on the second floor of city hall, located at 301 E. Huron. A more detailed report will follow: [link]

I’m gonna level with you: I’m writing this because I need $150 this month.

David Erik Nelson

Here’s the situation: My Lovely Wife is a dirty rotten greedy school teacher. In order to teach her (and her cohort) a valuable lesson, the state – on your behalf – is giving no cost-of-living wage increases for the foreseeable future, moving no one up in seniority for at least two years [1] (thus stalling everyone’s progress toward tenure, which the legislature is hot on killing anyway), and forcing teachers to cover an additional ten percent of their healthcare costs.

In our case, as a family of three (with one more on the way – more on that below), this means that her pay is going down $150 per month and her benefits being decreased, even as her workload increases.

That’s because staff has been cut to the bone – example: last week she worked a 14-hour day with one brief break. That’s not “8 hours, plus commute, plus grading while sitting on the sofa at home, rounded up.” She worked 14 hours in the school building in almost constant contact with students, staff, or parents.

Fortunately for us, while my Better Portion has a fixed wage (she being on an annual contract), I’m a freelancer; if her salary takes a hit or our expenses pop up, I hustle for more work to close the gap. Over the past four years, almost all increases in our expenses have been covered by expansions in my hustle, because, you know, she’s a dirty rotten lazy school teacher and needs to be put in her place.

When presented with this $150 gap, I contacted the publishers of This Fair Periodical of Note.

I made the following pitch to The Chronicle:

I want to write you a column because I need $150 per month. For the purposes of this project, I am an honest capitalist living in a consumer democracy. I will happily exchange a good (this column) and a service (whatever I pitch in to the ensuing discussion) for cash-money. In the spirit of full and complete disclosure, the first column must make perfectly clear that I am writing this column in order to make up the $150 we need so that my pregnant wife, our five-year-old, and I can continue to enjoy something akin to the healthcare benefits available to every ne’erdowell, miscreant, and convicted scamp in the rest of the industrialized world. That rate, again, is $150 – let there be no question as to my motivations.

But what would this column be about?

Money and Time

For 99% of the population, Money is the transferable literalization of our one real, finite, non-fungible asset: our Time. For individuals, Money is Time and Effort: We swap Time/Effort to get Money that we can then swap with others for their Time/Effort (or the fruits thereof).

Each of us gets a finite amount of Time in our lives. Money/Time/Effort spent on one thing cannot be used for another. It is, at rock bottom, the Human Resource.

But to corporations and governments – who, like Lovecraftian creatures, are deathless and eldritch beings not bound by time on the human scale – Money is different. Unbounded absurdities arise when a human is in an economic interaction with a Deathless Thing from a Dimension Beyond Time.

In future columns I’ll offer examples of where that Money-Time exchange becomes kind of crazy, and give you, Gentle Readers, a place to share your related examples or counter examples.

First Installment: Color of Risk

To kick us off, here is my inciting incident: At his annual school physical my five-year-old was confused by the colored stripes on the eye-chart. This could be nothing, except for that his maternal uncle and maternal great-grandfather (on his mother’s maternal side, no less!) are/were both red-green color blind, meaning that my wife (the boy’s mother) is likely a carrier of this gene that largely afflicts males (and, interestingly, often coincides with sharper visual pattern recognition: red-green colorblind men make excellent hunters, just like my boy’s maternal uncle and great-grandfather).

At the physical, his doctor began writing a referral to an eye specialist who could ascertain exactly how far skewed the boy’s color perception is, and whether or not this might have educational ramifications (I know that might sound kind of absurd to folks without first-hand color-blindness experience, so you’ll either have to take it on faith or do some Googling of your own in order to confirm that undiagnosed colorblindness in early elementary often maps to a whole cluster of developmental issues, especially regarding literacy and classroom behavior).

In abstract, this is how we expect the system to work: A fully qualified, licensed professional, knowing the limits of her training and equipment, decided to turn things over to a specialist. When I asked if my insurance would cover this visit to the eye guy, the doctor’s pen stopped moving mid-referral and she stared at the paper. I’d better call Blue Cross first, she said carefully, Just to be sure.

That afternoon I spent my own unbillable hour on the phone bouncing between Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBS) and the University of Michigan eye clinic in order to ultimately discover that no one could say for certain whether or not my insurance would cover our five-year-old’s impending visit to the ophthalmologist. This is because none of them could determine in advance if his possible color blindness was or was not “medical” (their term). “Medical” color blindness they’ll pay for. “Vision” color blindness they won’t. As you might guess, these divisions are not recognized by science or medicine. These are boxes on a form, and have to do with how much Money (if any) the insurance we’re paying for will offer the doctors we’d like to pay.

Did I mention that my lovely pregnant wife is pregnant? As someone over 35 she’s entering a slightly higher risk pool of potential mothers; this has already mandated an extra $1,800 in testing. Insurance? They might cover this. Who can really say, you know? I mean, can we prove that these were medical tests on her body and that of the potential human in her guts?

Maybe we’re on the hook for this additional expense, maybe not. But that possibility wracks hell on our financial planning, as I both need to budget for the extra Money to pay for the tests, and for the extra Time in unbillable hours spent on the phone with BCBS. If I get that second estimate off, then it will monkeywrench my ability to scratch together the actual cash-money to pay the bill if I lose the argument and end up having to ante up on the full amount. That hour on the phone is very dear to me, but costs BCBS next to nothing. This is why you are put on hold. It’s the same reason an army will blockade a city instead of attacking.

This is precisely what our column is about: Highlighting the places where the party with the stronger negotiating position (e.g., BCBS and, to a lesser degree, the entire UM medical system) forces the weaker to bear all of the risk in the transaction: They are enormous and evolved to shed risk like a duck sheds water. In the grand scheme, BCBS has infinite Time, a minuscule sliver of which they budget to deflecting weaker parties like me.

I was born and shall die; I cannot budget as much Time to this argument as they can, cannot scrap together as much Money as they can demand (SPOILER ALERT: More hospital billing in future columns!) At the base of it all is the core Free Market axiom: They have a scarce resource I need – Delivering Potentially High-Risk Babies – and the only resource I have that they want is Money, which is Time, which is ticking away as I type this very word.

Anyway, to recap: We are a highly educated married couple with no debt (apart from a very prudent mortgage on a right-sized home) living a nominally middle-class life in Middle America. My kid can’t see green and has a heart murmur and is damn lucky to have a bus to school, and a school to go to. My wife is a greedy, terrible, pregnant, unionized public servant; to punish her for these sins, her employers – all of us citizens, which is to say You and Me and Her and Our Squinty Kid and Everyone Not Reading This – cut her pay. Ironically, this means my family has less Time and Money to support the work of our Fellow Citizens (i.e., You).

But, in terms of our own self-interested personal finances, we needed an extra $150 per month.

And I just earned that.

[1] My First, Last, and Everything was concerned that I may have inadvertently misled you Dear Readers on this point, so to clarify: The seniority freeze was technically negotiated at the local level by the districts that have implemented such freezes; there is no across-the-board statewide freeze (in contrast to the healthcare contribution cut, which is statewide, and impacts many public servants). So, My Best Beloved argues that this is a local smackdown on teachers, not a state smackdown. But I’d like to point out that this concession was only necessary because of an artificial budget shortfall created at the state level. In other words, a strawman might seem to have great fashion sense, but he’s still only wearing what the farmer gives him.

About the author: David Erik Nelson has written columns previously for The Chronicle on topics like medical marijuana and glass-eating clowns. Nelson is the author of various books, including most recently, “Snip, Burn, Solder, Shred“.

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our publication of local columnists like David Erik Nelson. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

The revisions to the ordinances resulted from a collective bargaining agreement with AFSCME and a binding arbitration under Act 312 with AAPOA. The changes are similar to ordinance changes already enacted for non-union city workers.

The pension contribution for AAPOA and AFSCME workers will rise from 5% on a post-tax basis to 6% on a pre-tax basis. The vesting period for new hires will increase from 5 years to 10 years. Also for new hires, the final average compensation (FAC) calculation will be increased to a five-year period. The previous FAC was based on a three-year period.

On the health care side, the AFSCME and AAPOA employees would have the same access-only retiree health plan as non-union employees have. Like all ordinance changes, the city council will need to give these revisions a second and final approval no sooner than its next regular meeting.

This brief was filed from the city council’s chambers on the second floor of city hall, located at 301 E. Huron. A more detailed report will follow: [link]

Caryette Fenner, president of AFSCME Local 2733, the labor union representing the largest number of Washtenaw County government employees. (Photo by the writer.)

The deals affect 675 union employees, as well as 271 non-union, court non-union and elected officials – or nearly 70% of the county’s total 1,369 employees.

AFSCME Local 2733 represents about half of the county’s employees – 644 people. The Local 2733 agreement was ratified by a 2-to-1 vote earlier this week, but only 325 members voted. Caryette Fenner, president of Local 2733, described it as a typical turnout.

County administrator Verna McDaniel said these three agreements, coupled with those already approved, will yield $7.7 million in savings over 2012 and 2013. The county has a goal of gaining $8 million in labor concessions for that two-year period, to help overcome an estimated $17.5 million deficit.

McDaniel is expected to present a draft budget to the board at its Sept. 21 meeting.

There was no discussion before the board vote, which occurred after the board emerged from a 30-minute closed session to discuss labor negotiations. Commissioner Dan Smith (R-District 2) cast the lone vote against the agreements.

In a follow-up interview with The Chronicle, Smith cited concerns over health care provisions that would cost the county more than he had been led to expect, based on previous agreements already approved by the board for Michigan Nurses Association Units I and II.

And because of “me too” clauses in other union agreements, the more favorable terms negotiated by AFSCME Local 2733 will likely be applied to other union contracts as well.

In addition to the agreement with five bargaining units of AFSCME Local 2733, Tuesday’s approved agreements were with: (1) the two bargaining units of TPOAM (Technical, Professional and Officeworkers Association of Michigan); and (2) one of two bargaining units of AFSCME Local 3052. Also, the same benefits that AFSCME Local 2733 receives will be extended to the non-union, court non-union and elected officials.

The second bargaining unit of AFSCME Local 3052, representing 55 general supervisors, voted down its agreement this week. Nancy Heine, president of AFSCME Local 3052, told The Chronicle that union leaders would be polling their membership on Wednesday to determine what issues caused members to reject the tentative agreement.

In addition, agreements have not yet been reached with four other bargaining units: Two units with the Assistant Prosecutors Association, representing 24 employees; and two units with the Public Defenders Association, representing 13 employees.

Two other bargaining units – the Police Officers Association of Michigan (POAM) and the Command Officers Association of Michigan (COAM) – earlier this year reached agreements that aren’t part of the $8 million goal. The POAM and COAM deals are for a four-year period through 2014.

Details of the Agreements: AFSCME

AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees) Local 2733 represents a total of 644 members. There are five bargaining units within Local 2733. The largest is Unit A with about 340 members, including all general county professional employees who have a four-year college degree or higher, excluding supervisors and jobs in several other categories.

Other Local 2733 units are:

• Unit B – general county employees whose job requires less than a four-year degree, excluding supervisors, administrative staff, and personnel in several other categories.
• Unit C – all employees of the 22nd Circuit Court and Friend of the Court program, excluding supervisors.
• Family Division/Juvenile Center – all employees of the Washtenaw County Trial Court’s Family Division/Juvenile Center, excluding supervisors, court bailiffs/officers, and temporary or seasonal employees.
• Juvenile Detention – all employees of the county juvenile detention facility, excluding supervisors, court bailiffs/officers, and temporary or seasonal employees.

Agreements for the AFSCME units run through Dec. 31, 2013. [.pdf file – summary of AFSCME agreement] The agreements stipulate no wage increases unless property tax revenues increase by at least 2% on or before Dec. 31, 2012. In that case, a 1% wage increase will take effect on Jan. 1, 2013.

Other items include:

• a 10% employee contribution to the Washtenaw County Employees’ Retirement System (WCERS). The vesting period will increase from eight years to 10 years, though current employees will be grandfathered in at eight years.
• $75/month premium sharing for the core health care plan. Currently, employees do not pay premiums.
• Co-pays will increase or be added. For example, the co-pay for an emergency room visit increases from $50 to $250. Co-pays for prescription drugs will increase ($0 to $7 for generic drugs, $30 to $70 for brands).
• 10 bank leave days for 2012 and 2013. No furlough days will be imposed. Though bank leave and furlough days are similar – both are unpaid – the bank leave days do not affect calculations toward an employee’s retirement or longevity pay. In contrast, furlough days are deducted from the calculations toward retirement and longevity pay.
• Longevity payouts will be eliminated for new hires after Jan. 1, 2012; for other employees, longevity payouts will be reduced by 25% in 2012. There will be no reduction in longevity pay in 2013. (Longevity pay is a benefit provided to employees based on years of service with the organization – generally available after 5 years of service. Employees would receive between 3%-9% of their prior year’s wages, paid out either in a lump sum payment or bi-weekly throughout the year.)
• Step increases – automatic increases in wages that are built into an employee’s contract – will remain in place for 2012, but will be frozen for 2013.
• Tuition reimbursement is frozen at 0% for 2012 and 2013.
• Payout for excess vacation will be eliminated for 2012 and 2013.

Details of the Agreements: TPOAM

TPOAM (Technical, Professional and Officeworkers Association of Michigan) represents 27 total members in two bargaining units: (1) Unit I – all senior deputy district court clerks, deputy district court clerks and probation secretaries at the 14-A District Court; and (2) Unit II – supervisors and probation officers at the 14-A District Court, excluding magistrates and the deputy court administrator. Until last year, these employees had been represented by the Teamsters, but they voted to de-certify and become certified as part of the TPOAM union instead.

The TPOAM agreement also includes a 1% wage increase, effective Jan. 1, 2013, if property tax revenues increase by at least 2% on or before Dec. 31, 2012. [.pdf file – summary of TPOAM agreement] Though the “me too” clause will likely cause some of these items to be modified, other elements of the agreement approved by the board on Tuesday include:

• a 2% employee contribution to the Washtenaw County Employees’ Retirement System (WCERS).
• a $150/month premium sharing for the core health care plan for nine months.
• 10 bank leave days for 2012 and 2013.
• Longevity payouts will be eliminated for new hires after Jan. 1, 2012. For other employees, longevity payouts will be reduced by 50% in 2012 and 2013.
• Step increases will be frozen in 2012 and 2013.

Unlike the AFSCME agreement, the TPOAM agreement also states that if Gov. Rick Snyder does not sign the 80/20 legislation into law, the union can re-open negotiations with the county. That legislation would require public employees to pay 20% of their health care costs, effective Jan. 1, 2012, or would cap the amount that local governments would pay as premiums for employees.

Labor Agreements: Commissioner Vote

All resolutions are voted on twice by the board. First, they’re voted on at the meeting of Ways & Means, a committee of the entire board.  Resolutions are given a final vote at the regular board meeting. Ways & Means and regular board meetings are held back-to-back, but typically a resolution that’s passed at the Ways & Means meeting is considered at the regular board meeting two weeks later.

However, for some items that the administration or board wants to expedite, votes are taken the same evening at both meetings. That was the case with the resolution on the labor agreements at the Sept. 13 special meeting.

Early in the Ways & Means meeting, commissioners entered into a closed session to discuss labor negotiations, which lasted about 30 minutes. When they emerged, they handled the main action items on the agenda – resolutions to approve the three labor agreements.

There was no discussion about the agreements. Generally, commissioners follow the advice of the administration and corporation counsel not to publicly discuss labor issues, particularly during contract negotiations.

Outcome: The board’s vote at its Ways & Means Committee meeting passed unanimously. Wes Prater and Ronnie Peterson were absent.

The board moved immediately into it regular board meeting. Again, the main action items on the agenda were approval of the three labor agreements. And again, there was no discussion on these items.

The final vote taken at the board’s regular meeting passed on an 8-1 vote, with dissent from Dan Smith (R-District 2). Wes Prater and Ronnie Peterson were absent.

Reached later this week by The Chronicle, Dan Smith indicated that his vote against the agreements was due in part to the health care benefits, which he described as significantly different from what he’d expected to see. He had believed the benefits would be similar to agreements previously approved by the board for the Michigan Nurses Association Units I and II, representing a total of 15 employees.

In those agreements, for example, health insurance premium sharing was $150 per month. In the AFSCME agreements, the premium sharing is half that amount – $75 per month. He noted that with “me too” clauses in other union agreements, the premium sharing will likely be lowered for other employees too.

Smith also noted that the AFSCME agreements aren’t congruent with the state law that’s expected to take effect Sept. 15, and he objected to rushing the agreements through at the last minute.

The state law that Smith referred to is the “Publicly Funded Health Insurance Contribution Act,” which was passed by the Michigan legislature on Aug. 24, 2011. It is scheduled to be signed by Gov. Rick Snyder on Sept. 15. Agreements that are in place before that date do not have to conform with the act, which is also often referred to as “80/20″ legislation. [.pdf of the bill]

The legislation stipulates maximum “hard cap” dollar amount equivalents that public employers can contribute toward employee healthcare: $5,500 for single-person coverage, $11,000 for individual and spouse coverage, and $15,000 for family coverage – for coverage years beginning on or after Jan. 1, 2012. There’s another option that an employer can follow, if approved by a simple majority vote of its governing body, which would limit the benefit contributed by the employer percentage-wise instead of using a hard cap. On that option, public employers could contribute no more than 80% of their employees’ health care costs for coverage years beginning on or after Jan. 1, 2012.

However, on a 2/3 majority vote, which must be repeated each year, a governing body of a public employer can opt out of these requirements. In an email to The Chronicle on Monday, county administrator Verna McDaniel stated that the board will be asked to opt out, which would exempt the county employees from the requirements of this law.

Reaction of Union Leaders

Several union representatives attended the Sept. 13 meeting, though they did not address the board during public commentary.

Caryette Fenner, president of Local 2733, said it had been a difficult negotiation, especially since union members had already given concessions in 2009, for the 2010 and 2011 calendar years. [At the time, those concessions were expected to save the county about $5.8 million over two years.]

She noted that one significant difference between the previous contract and the current one is the stipulation that members will receive a 1% raise in 2013 if the county’s property tax revenues increase 2% or more in 2012. They didn’t have that assurance when they made wage concessions in 2009, she said, and it turned out that tax revenues had been better than originally projected. [Though the county's property tax revenues have been better than projected, revenues still declined – falling 5.33% in 2010 and 2.85% this year. For this year, the county's equalization staff had originally projected a drop of 8.5%.]

Fenner also observed that even with the concessions made in this labor agreement, there’s no assurance that the county won’t cut jobs.

Nancy Heine, president of AFSCME Local 3052 – which voted down their tentative agreement – told The Chronicle that the membership would be polled to determine what issues caused them to reject the tentative agreement. There’s a question about whether everyone is bearing their fair share, she said, as well as concerns over whether employees who are already struggling will be able to absorb even more cuts. Some union members have already lost their homes to foreclosure, she said, and others are worried that they won’t be able to make mortgage payments if their longevity pay is cut – that’s a direct hit to their paychecks, she noted.

Heine also said that only nine of the Local 3052 members are “general fund” employees – that is, employees whose salaries and benefits are paid for out of the county’s general fund, which gets the majority of its funding from property tax revenue. Savings from concessions made by non-general fund employees won’t help the county deal with its projected $17.5 million deficit, she noted. [Examples of non-general fund departments include the parks & recreation commission and CSTS (community support & treatment services).]

Present: Barbara Levin Bergman, Leah Gunn, Kristin Judge, Alicia Ping, Yousef Rabhi, Rolland Sizemore Jr., Dan Smith, Conan Smith, and Rob Turner.

Absent: Ronnie Peterson, Wes Prater

Next working sessions: Thursday, Sept. 15, 2011 at 6:30 p.m. at the county administration building, 220 N. Main St. in Ann Arbor. An additional working session is set for Thursday, Sept. 22 at 6:30 p.m.

Next regular board meeting: Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2011 at 6:30 p.m. at the county administration building, 220 N. Main St. in Ann Arbor. The Ways & Means Committee meets first, followed immediately by the regular board meeting. [confirm date] (Though the agenda states that the regular board meeting begins at 6:45 p.m., it usually starts much later – times vary depending on what’s on the agenda.) Public comment sessions are held at the beginning and end of each meeting.

The Chronicle could not survive without regular voluntary subscriptions to support our coverage of public bodies like the Washtenaw County board of commissioners. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

The first was a change in the pension system for members of its police service specialist union. The council had approved the collectively bargained changes at its June 20, 2011 meeting. And the council had given initial approval to the ordinance change at its July 18 meeting.

Under the old ordinance, members of that union made a 5% post-tax contribution to their pension. That will change to a 6% pre-tax contribution made by members of the police service specialist union. The change will be effective starting Aug. 14, 2011.

The council also gave final approval to a revision to the city’s ordinance that covers how a city retiree’s health care is paid for. The council had given initial approval to the ordinance change at its July 18 meeting. The revision to the ordinance distinguishes between “subsidized retirees” and “non-subsidized retirees.” A non-subsidized retiree is someone who is hired or re-employed into a non-union position with the city on or after July 1, 2011. In their retirement, non-subsidized retirees will have access to health care they can pay for themselves, but it will not be subsidized by the city.

At its June 6, 2011 meeting, the city council had directed the city staff to prepare an ordinance change along these lines.

This brief was filed from the city council’s chambers on the second floor of city hall, located at 301 E. Huron. A more detailed report will follow: [link]

At its June 6, 2011 meeting, the city council had directed the staff to prepare an ordinance change along these lines.

Because it is a change to a city ordinance, the initial approval given to the change in the city’s retiree health system will require a public hearing and a second, final approval at another meeting.

This brief was filed from the city council’s chambers on the second floor of city hall, located at 301 E. Huron. A more detailed report will follow: [link]

The goal is to develop a plan to provide better health care for the county’s low-income residents, the uninsured and people on Medicaid – prior to changes that will be mandated by the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

The Washtenaw Health Initiative (WHI) is a collaboration led by retired Saint Joseph Mercy Health System chief executive officer Bob Laverty, former county administrator Bob Guenzel, and retired University of Michigan treasurer Norm Herbert. The effort is jointly sponsored by the UM Health System and Saint Joseph Mercy Health System, and faciliated by Marianne Udow-Phillips, director of the Center for Healthcare Research & Transformation – a joint venture of UM and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan. Several other groups, including Washtenaw United Way and the county public health department, are also involved.

Organizers say they hope this initiative will become a model for other communities nationwide that are facing similar issues.

Details of exactly what kind of services will be provided, what funding and other resources will be tapped, and how a coverage plan will be implemented haven’t yet been determined. Initial steps that could occur as early as this year include reaching out to enroll about 6,000 county residents who are eligible for Medicaid but not currently signed up for that coverage. Another project that could be implemented this year entails coordinating local dental clinics to offer sliding scale fees for low-income residents.

More information is available on the initiative’s website. [.pdf of WHI press release] [.pdf of Washtenaw County health care overview]