The session reviewed upcoming agenda items for the July 21 council meeting, including employee benefits, infrastructure projects, zoning changes, and housing policy reforms. No final votes were taken; the meeting focused on discussion and preparation.
Okay, everybody, we are gonna call the Tuesday July 14th agenda session to order. And we will begin. This will be the agenda for next week's meeting. And we will start out with any presentations, reports, or discussion items we have, and then we'll move into the consent agenda. After we vote to approve the minutes, we will have the annual employee benefit renewal. Um it's a resolution to improve to approve the 2027 employee benefits package. Actually, a notice went out from uh HR to staff today. Um, and I want to commend our HR department for working to keep our um increase cost increases low while keeping our benefits robust. So this is vision health, dental, all of those great things. And um Missy Hutchison is here if you have questions for her about that item. Ms. Turk. Uh thank you, Mayor. Um, yes, uh Missy, if you could kind of come up and give us a summary and some feedback that you may or may not have heard, that would be helpful. Yeah, I'm actually gonna invite our benefits broker to go through a brief presentation about this year's renewal, if that's okay, Todd with Brown and Brown. Okay. Is there a it's all up advance? Is there a click next? Oh okay, okay. So uh this this year uh we had a little tough year this year, uh about 109% uh in utilization. Um so so uh blue cross was asking for uh a fair increase, uh 7.10 percent is where we landed. Um last year we had a 2.6 percent increase. Um, and then utilization last year was about 102 percent. So trying to stay a little bit uh a little bit ahead of trend so that next year we're not impacted by as much of an increase. Um questions in regards to that, Teresa. I I guess maybe at the end or whatever, you could explain what the increase will be or how that will work. And I'll so I'll just hold my questions till then. Yep. And so you'll see on the illustration uh on the PowerPoint uh up at the top left corner, uh, year to date through March is when we did the uh that what they use for claims uh uh comparison. So you can see we're running about 109 percent um vision, dental base life, everything else was flat, so no it no impact on those. Really, we're talking about the medical is it was the only thing impacted this year for 2027. I actually do have a question here that I'm looking at on the HSA. It says no employer contribution changes, and so last year we had an increase in our rate, and we also had an increase in our contribution. Can you walk me through what our thinking is on keeping that with no change to the contribution from the employer? Just a budgetary item. So we're picking up the same cost shares of the premium increase. We're gonna pick up the majority of the increase of the premium. So it's just a budgetary item. So what will be allowed though is you'll be able to contribute more, or the employee and their family can contribute more into an HSA by law under the IRS standards for HSAs, but the employer is not contributing more into the HSA. We'll contribute the same amount that we are contributing now, which I think we have a slide directly on that. Oh, okay. I'll I'll hold my comments then. Thank you. Why don't you go to the next slide? Yeah, this is just showing the uh the impact of the increases over uh year over year and then the loss ratio. So right now we're like I said, 109. You can go the next slide. Um so so currently on our high deductible, it's a $3400 deductible, and the plan pays 100% after that. Um for the 2027 year IRS uh has us move up to the minimum $3,500 deductible to to uh keep the plans embedded, which means you just have to each person has an individual deductible. So IRS is forcing us to push up uh the minimum uh deductible on an embedded plan to 3500, and so you'll see in the next slide, I think.