Thank you, Mayor Recording.

I would just like to recall this meeting of the Johnsburg City Council to order this October 20th at 502.

Thank you.

Would you lead the pledge?

Under God.

Thank you.

Mayor Shermarks.

Skipping down to routine business.

The first item is the employee health and other benefits.

We have Assistant City Manager Love for presentation.

Thank you.

Good afternoon.

In your packet, you have a memo about this year's renewal for our health and other benefits.

And just in summary, as you know, we currently have a partnership with Signa for our medical vision and dental care.

And then we are with the standard company for our short-term and long-term disability insurances as well as our life insurance.

And so in partnership with our broker, we went out to test the market for proposals.

And those came back in, and we are recommending to remain with Cigna as well as standard for all of those lines of coverage.

And we can get into some of the detail for that.

But a higher level perspective, as you know, our personnel costs are the majority of the city's annual budget for FY26, the adopted budget.

There's a little over 45 million dollars budgeted for personnel cost.

Majority of that is public safety, as we have about 195 positions that support us through public safety services.

One of the things that we pride ourselves in is providing our staff not only a diversified package of benefits with specific choices between plans, but also very high quality.

We're on a calendar year basis for these benefits.

One of the things that helped with this year's renewal is the city's commitment to wellness and the wellness initiatives that have been put in place by incentivizing employees to participate in preventative care measures as well as lunch and learns, wellness coaching, a variety of other resources, uh challenges that we have throughout the year to help employees become more aware of wellness and the impacts that it has not only their physical wellness but also their mental wellness.

And in the memo, we speak to in this year's renewal related to our health and health benefits, which that is medical vision and dental.

So when we're talking about health benefits, those are those three lines of coverage.

For our coverage.

And the difference in this fully insured plan and a level funded plan are that we have opportunities to one, make changes to that formulary or prescription drug listing.

We also get more information about claims data so that we can integrate that more successfully in our wellness program.

It's not to the point of a fully insured plan where we would be uh have access to all of our claims data and we would determine every uh drug that would be in the formulary.

But it's a hybrid, and so we get kind of the boast, the best of both worlds, if you will, at this point, so that we also have that stop gap coverage to protect us against very large uh catastrophic types of claims.

So in this particular proposal, the base proposal is a zero-based increase.

However, staff is proposing layering on a HRA, a health reimbursement account to provide and enhance the benefit to employees, so therefore, through the HRA, they can be reimbursed, their out-of-pocket expenses up to the deductible amount.

Um there is no charge to the employee for that.

There is a cost to the city of about $150,000, as you can see laid out in the memo.

One of the reasons that we are able to get such a good renewal for this year, and I know you recall last year concerns about the cost of claims rising, and even when we went into the budget process this year, actually we were looking at 15 percent, and then we wound up in negotiations at 7.5 percent because we were not finalized with any of the proposals at that time.

So we did wind up at zero.

But our claims ratio was 70.7 percent, 70.71 percent from January through July of 2025, as compared to 334.71 percent for the same period in 2024.

So a marked uh improvement in that.

Of course, in any given year, um, those claims ratio, you know, can can go up and and/or down.

So that's the reason for the the good renewal.

Um on the dental plan, we had been uh in negotiations and we had a range of like seven and a half to nine point three percent is what we were talking about in the budget process.

That number landed at 7.5 percent for the renewal across both plans, so both the low and the high plan.

Vision, there's no change in that, and then the standard we had a rate guarantee through 2027.

However, we went out anyway to see if there were any um more enhanced or better packaged um deals for both our short-term, long-term and life insurance.

And there were not.

So uh we are proposing to stay uh with the standard.

With the amount that we budgeted as compared to what we would be paying in premiums, the city will realize a savings from a budgetary standpoint of around a million dollars on the um the health, and then um probably about 46,000 um on the dental.

Now that's based on a snapshot in time.

We're getting ready to move into open enrollment, so there will be some fluctuation in that in that we don't know if everyone is staying with the current plan they're in, or they'll be moving, or if people don't currently have our current coverage and they're gonna be signing up for our coverage.

So that's the general snapshot based on what we know uh right now on that on that census.

In the memo that you received with the packet, there is two examples.

One is a firefighter and another is a police officer, a entry level or a step one to show the impact of the premium uh for the coming year for 2026.

So the first one being a police officer, uh a hypothetical in the high deductible plan would pay for family coverage, which is the highest cost to both the city and the employee of $16.14 more.

That's medical vision and dental combined.

For a firefighter on a POS, the point of service plan, entry level, step one, that person would pay $18.92 more per pay period for that plan.

The city approved in our budget, adopted budget, there's a 2.7 percent COLA.

So in the example, that police officer, that colo would uh, that person would receive $63.86 more per pay period, and they would be paying $16.14 of that 63 towards uh their health benefits.

And the firefighter um example, that person would receive $58.41 cents more for the COLA per pay period, and they would be paying $18.92 of that amount for the health benefits.

That's it, kind of in a nutshell.