Contract Negotiations/Health Benefits Update

To: All College Faculty

From: Jim Mahler

Re: Contract Negotiations/Health Benefits Update

Many of you have asked what the recent signing of the State budget will mean to us as far as a salary increase is concerned.

Our next step in this process is to ascertain exactly how many dollars will be coming our way via the resource allocation model we negotiated with the District. We are working on those calculations now.

Once the dollar amount resource is determined, we will then apply it to fund as many of the initiatives as we can from our initial proposal which we sunshined to the District on June 9th (a copy is attached). Not all of our available resources will go directly into salary as there are several other items you have asked us to address. We will also be needing to complete the meet and negotiate process with the District, which, hopefully, will not be a protracted battle as in the past, thanks to the resource allocation model.

Now for the bad news: Health benefit premiums are slated to increase significantly effective January 1, 2006. Here’s what the new rates are looking like: Kaiser $579.05/mo. (4.71% increase), PacifiCare HMO10
$658.18/mo. (9.81% increase), PacifiCare POSA15 $694.76/mo. (19.1%
increase).

Our increases for PacifiCare are higher than the VEBA average and reflect our District’s utilization, especially at Scripps who charges the highest rates and have the highest percentage increase.

On the plus side, our Kaiser rate increase is less than the VEBA average.
Also, there will be no increase for either the dental or vision plans. The money we are due to receive from the Equalization funding should ensure that the Kaiser rate will be fully funded. However, employees in PacifiCare are likely to be faced with out of pocket costs equal to the difference between the Kaiser rate and the PacifiCare rates.

As soon as I have more information at hand I will be sure to send it out to all of you. I’m sorry I don’t have any firm dollar figures to share yet.

Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions or concerns.

In Unity,

Jim

AFT Intial Proposal