OC Weekly
October 10 – 16, 2003
Million-Dollar Munchkins
By Nick Schou
Huntington Beach City Council members aren’t in the job for the money: as part-time Surf City employees, their salaries are set at only $175 per month each. But they may be attracted to the handsome medical benefits that come with their elected posts: council members are the only part-time municipal employees who receive full medical benefits under Huntington Beach’s generous health plan.
Exhibit A: Councilwoman Pam Julien Houchen, who was first elected to the council in 1996 and served as mayor in 2001. Last year, Houchen took a two-month break from council meetings to give birth to triplets-a procedure that may have cost as much as $2 million. Fortunately for Houchen, the tab was entirely covered by the city employees’ health package, which is paid for by city taxpayers.
Houchen’s medical benefits will disappear as soon as a she leaves office. But Houchen’s expensive childbirth took place even as Huntington Beach began eliminating social services and laying off employees to save money. Late last year, the council voted to stop funding the only community center in Oakview, Surf City’s impoverished and long-neglected Latino neighborhood.
And on July 7, the council voted to eliminate 70 positions at City Hall. Twelve employees were laid off, nine retired early, 19 were switched to other departments and another 12 were demoted to lesser-paying jobs.
And more layoffs are on the horizon. According to Clay Martin, director of the city’s administrative-services department, part-time councilmembers are also negotiating to have full-time city employees increase their monthly contributions to the city’s health plan. Council members would also have to pay more, but not the rest of the city’s part-timers, who don’t receive any medical benefits at all.
Houchen’s triplets appear to have caused a major increase in the cost of the city’s employee health plan. The year before she gave birth (fiscal year
2000-2001), the city’s health plan-which covers 985 employees-cost taxpayers
$8,516,092, not including Medicare payments, unemployment insurance or worker’s-compensation costs. The year she became a happy mother of three,
those costs increased more than 40 percent to a whopping $12,027,917.
Meanwhile, budget figures from other cities show that Huntington Beach had
the highest per-employee health-care costs that year: $12,211.But one of the city’s most vocal critics of city-employee benefits, Chuck Scheid, said he doesn’t care about Houchen’s triplets or the fact that council members receive full medical benefits.
“It’s a perk; hell, let’s face it,” he said. “And it can be a very valuable one, I guess. I don’t find anything wrong with it per se, or even that a part-time employee doesn’t get it and a part-time elected person does. They tend to get more than the man in the street.”
http://www.ocweekly.com/ink/04/06/news-schou.php
Comment: So let’s face it. In affluent Orange County, health care is a very generous “perk” for the elite, but not an entitlement for Huntington Beach’s
part-time city employees.
Not only is Huntington Beach’s health coverage highly inequitable, it also demonstrates the impact of major “losses” on a relatively small risk pool.
It’s not as if we don’t understand policies that would make health care accessible and affordable for everyone. We do. What we can’t understand is why we aren’t doing it.