County looking at options for health insurance
After this year, Brown County government’s current health insurance contract is up, and the human resources department is looking at options to bring costs down.
At the Feb. 5 Brown County Commissioners meeting, Human Resources Coordinator Melissa Stinson said she’d be meeting with Brown County Schools Superintendent Laura Hammack and the schools’ benefits adviser, R.E. Sutton & Associates, about what the school district did. When Hammack took over as superintendent, the district went with a different insurance provider and opened its own clinic. Those changes have taken the district from a $700,000 deficit in the self-insurance fund to a $1.4 million cash balance as of last month. Because of switching insurance companies, school employees have not seen a health insurance increase in two years.
The county government also participates in the Brown County Health and Wellness Center by purchasing memberships for employees. That move helped the clinic to be open five days a week.
“We’re trying to get this moving as fast as possible because we do need to get this finished, so we can start doing bids,” Stinson said.
Resident Tim Clark encouraged the commissioners to mimic what the schools are doing when it comes to health insurance and overall budgeting. Despite declining revenue, the district continues to build up reserves by making cuts without any teachers losing their jobs.
Recently it was announced that the county’s rainy day fund dipped well below $500,000 from $1.4 million at the beginning of last year. Some of that was caused by unexpected costs related to health insurance.
“If there was an award I could write up for them, I would do it,” Clark said about the school district. “When they can increase significantly the quality they provide for less money every year because of decrease in enrollment, that’s a phenomenal success story that should be told nationally.”
Commissioners President Jerry Pittman said he intended to also attend the meeting with the school district to learn more. “I desperately want to tackle this insurance problem,” he said.
“We’re not married to anybody. We don’t owe anybody anything when it comes to financing insurance. This year we have to complete the contract we singed two or three years ago, but beyond that next year, I am in favor of exploring every opportunity. You pointed out people who have actually been able to tame this problem. Nobody has conquered it. Health care is horribly expensive.”
Commissioner Diana Biddle said the county is lucky to have Hammack. “She is worth every penny,” she said.
“The things she has done have been remarkable,” Pittman added.
“I admire her. I think the school board made a good choice in hiring her.”
Compensation study still being pursued
The Brown County Commissioners gave Human Resources Coordinator Melissa Stinson the OK to go before the Brown County Council to recommend engaging with a firm to do a new study on job descriptions and employee compensation.
Stinson told the commissioners on Feb. 5 that she had spoken with Waggoner, Irwin, Scheele & Associates who said the study would not cost any more than $39,000. The study will take six to eight months to complete, and the council would use it when determining the budget for 2022. Stinson will ask the council for their consent to do the study and about possibly helping to fund it.
A committee of council members completed a salary study in 2018 that graduate students had started in 2017, but is not accurate and not useful, Stinson said in January. The study did not address the job descriptions in place currently, and some are outdated, commissioner Diana Biddle said.
“We still have job descriptions that say someone has to be able to use an adding machine and a typewriter. They are not updated for technology,” she said.
They also not updated to reflect physical labor requirements for positions like drivers with the Brown County Highway Department. “If (highway superintendent) Mike (Magner) says they’re a truck driver and Mike expects that truck driver to get out and use a shovel or work physically, everything that they need to do in that job needs to be listed,” Stinson said.
Commissioners President Jerry Pittman said the IU study was “interesting,” but that “it certainly did not do the job we needed done, which is why we’re looking at this now.”
“We tried to save some money there by doing it for free, but it didn’t do the job, so now we’re back looking at it again,” he said.
Biddle said it may be possible to spread the fee out over 18 months instead of paying it all at once. The study would have to be done by June of next year so that the council could vote on it in July, then it would go into effect with the new salary ordinance for 2022.
The study also will look at workloads in each office. “I do think that workload needs to be looked at. Across the board, we usually say all first deputies are an eight (pay grade). Some of them work really hard and others of them have special times during the year where they work extremely hard, so I think we need to look at everything across the board and look at workload, where we’re at with that,” Stinson said.
Resident Sherrie Mitchell said she is interested to know if some offices are overstaffed. Biddle said the study would not look at the efficiency of individual employees, but rather the positions overall. “If there are two positions that could be combined, as I recall, they will recommend that. It is something you’ll have to look at; you won’t have a choice but to consider it,” Biddle said.
Pittman said the county’s pay for employees, especially deputies with the Brown County Sheriff’s Department and drivers with the highway department, must be looked at with this study as well. “We need to stop training sheriff’s deputies and truck drivers for other counties. Our competition is not other counties our size. It’s Bartholomew, Monroe, Johnson and Jackson. These bigger counties pay more,” he said.
“We send a deputy to the law enforcement academy for 16 weeks and we pay his salary all of that time. He comes back, works for us a year and then he takes a job for $3 an hour more. We lose our truck drivers, too.”
One of the recommendations from the salary study committee was that deputies who are certified as instructors get $250 annually for each certification, up to $1,500. Having to send officers out of county for training costs the county in overtime pay, so having local trainers is a cost-saver. Those stipends were implemented for deputies in last year’s budget as a way to keep deputies here.
The commissioners unanimously approved Stinson to go before the council about engaging the firm for the study.
During the meeting, resident Tim Clark gave kudos to former council member Keith Baker and the additional work he put into the IU study. “I totally respect what Keith did. We worked one-on-one together on a lot of that. It’s a matter of codes and things that needed to be addressed that we don’t have addressed,” Stinson said.
