Charles Mobley spent 33 years working in transportation at El Paso County, as he describes it, responding “to every snowstorm, every blizzard, every flood.”
He stuck with it in anticipation of generous retirement benefits, which would fully cover his health insurance premium until he reached Medicare eligibility at 65.
“We used to refer to it as the carrot on the stick,” he said.
That incentive dissolved without warning this year when Mobley received his open enrollment letter. Retirees with more than 20 years of service in the county would now need to pay a portion of their monthly insurance premiums.
Now, the unanimous decision to charge long-serving retirees last month has been overturned in another unanimous decision on Wednesday.
The original vote was taken quietly in the September session of the county’s Health Plan Trust Board, a body made up of county department heads and one appointed retiree. All affected retirees who spoke with The Gazette said their first notification of the change came with open enrollment.
The monthly rate for retirees with more than two decades of employment starting next year would have been $56.08, half the rate paid by active employees. In 2027, the longest-serving retirees would need to pay the full premium rate for active employees, a yet-to-be-determined amount.
The decision received criticism from the group of about 300 retirees whose benefits would be affected. Members of the board who weren’t in attendance for the decision to raise rates also voiced opposition, among them Sheriff Joe Roybal.
The board reconvened Wednesday morning to reconsider the change with a packed audience of retirees and sheriff’s deputies. County Administrator Bret Waters called for the reconsideration, saying he found previously unknown evidence that the county had advertised free retirement health care insurance for longtime employees as part of recruitment and retention.
Waters pointed to a 2019 letter produced by the county with a breakdown of benefits, including retiree health care. The letter, which the county later stopped sending out, was saved and brought to the attention of Waters by a retiree after the decision.
“For me, that gave me pause on the last meeting,” he said.
Roybal read a statement condemning the benefits change as a breach of trust. He pointed to higher rates of injury and suicide among law enforcement, as well as the lack of medical retirement offered by the Sheriff’s Office, as reasons to keep the free benefit.
He called free health insurance a “cornerstone” of recruitment for a dangerous job with a salary consistently below the regional average.
“A promise made should be a promise kept,” he said.
Not all retirees in attendance were satisfied after the Wednesday reversal, concerned that their benefits could make it back to the list of things to cut in coming years.
Among them was Lisa Powell, who said she pulled 18-hour days during the COVID-19 pandemic as an emergency manager for El Paso County Public Health on the understanding that she would be able to retire with protected benefits before she started receiving Medicare.
“I think it’s probably something that will come up over and over simply because we don’t have a plethora of money anywhere, in any county,” she said.
County Chief Financial Officer Nikki Simmons pointed out in the meeting that the monthly payments proposed were only a small fraction of the overall cost of insurance premiums for retired employees.
Mobley said many retirees were living on a fixed income that might not accommodate the extra expense, especially since pensions aren’t subject to cost-of-living increases as salaries are.
“That slice gets smaller and smaller of what I can do,” he said.