Phase out health benefits for elected officials

Here at the Daily Herald, as in much of Des Plaines, over the last few weeks we have developed tennis neck watching the volleys and returns over whether elected city officials should continue to get health insurance.

In 2014, Alderman Denise Rodd proposed ending the long-standing benefits, and for two years tried and failed to get her proposal on a council agenda. In February 2016 it finally came up for public discussion, and was quickly voted down. So was her call for the question be put to voters in November.

But it turns out Des Plaines had never enacted an ordinance permitting elected officials to get health insurance in the first place. Somewhere in the mists of time, they just started getting it. Mayor Matt Bogusz seized on that, and two weeks after aldermen voted 6-2 to keep their benefits, he unilaterally ended them. Think of Richard M. Daley bulldozing Meigs Field one night as we all slept and you get the idea of the outrage this perpetrated.

Aldermen retaliated quickly. They rushed to prepare an ordinance, and on March 21 enacted it, reinstating their benefits. This week, Bogusz vetoed it. Sometime in mid-April, aldermen likely will override his veto.

Why go through all this, when the result is that nothing changes? Because, for all of his slash and burn tactics, Bogusz is setting a course. If this council doesn't voluntarily end its health benefits, a future council will. The writing is on the wall.

The mayor lost the battle but won a political victory. The citizenry is unlikely to rise to the defense of insurance benefits for public officials, and Bogusz will get points for taking the taxpayers' side.

Decades ago, insurance was cheap. It isn't cheap now, which on one hand explains why 6 out of 8 aldermen and the city clerk want to keep it. On the other hand, it cost the city more than $92,000 last year alone. Insurance costs will continue to rise, especially with the expected federal “Cadillac tax” imposed on Des Plaines starting in 2018 because of the city's generous insurance.

It's one thing to never have a benefit; it's something else entirely to have one and lose it. It makes one feel unappreciated, unloved. Most public servants don't get the credit they deserve for the meetings, the endless homework, the constituent calls, the interrupted dinners and missed family time, and the out-of-pocket expenses.

But given all that, it's time for Des Plaines (and Palatine, which, like Des Plaines, pays 88 percent of an elected official's premium for health coverage) to find a way to bring this to an end. Schaumburg offers health benefits if the elected officials pay 100 percent of the premiums; the Naperville council voted last November to end their own benefits.

In the suburbs that's pretty much it — and if this were a good idea, everybody would be doing it.

Des Plaines aldermen are term-limited, which means it could be possible to end the benefits without directly hurting any current officials. Better that the aldermen write their own ticket out of this than have a decree imposed on them. After all, they are only one vote away from losing a veto-proof majority and the next election is in April 2017.