In a unanimous vote last week, the Allentown City Council approved a bill that will grant domestic-partner benefits to the same-sex employees of city workers.
At a meeting packed with LGBT advocates, the council voted 7-0 on Jan. 19 to approve the domestic-partner measure introduced last month.
Allentown Mayor Ed Pawlowski was expected to sign the measure into law after press time on Wednesday.
Once the bill becomes law, Allentown, the third-largest city in the state, will become the fourth to offer benefits to same-sex partners of government employees, following Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Harrisburg.
The measure will specifically apply to about 1,000 members of Service Employees International Union, the city’s largest union, and nonunion managers and supervisors, both current and retired.
Prior to the vote last week, council approved several amendments to the measure, including one that exempted the fire and police unions from the law for the time being.
Adrian Shanker, vice president of the Pennsylvania Diversity Network, explained that the unions affected by the law must authorize a Memorandum of Understanding for legislation that would affect their union contracts, which those two unions had not yet done.
“Council President Mike D’Amore introduced an amendment that basically said that if and when the International Association of Firefighters and the Fraternal Order of Police signed the Memorandums of Understanding, then those employees would have access to the benefits,” Shanker explained. “So it just cleared a legal path. We do expect both police and fire to sign it, but their attorneys were still looking over the papers, so they weren’t able to do it before the vote.”
The issue of whether same-sex partners can be added to employees’ pension plans also arose.
An actuarial study commissioned by the city appeared to find that extending pension benefits to same-sex partners of LGBT fire and police employees would cost approximately $160,000 a year.
PA Diversity Network executive director Liz Bradbury said that figure is a gross overstatement, however, and is likely 10 times more than the real cost.
Council decided to revisit that component in the future after more accurate financial figures could be determined.
Even with the inaccurate price tag, however, Bradbury said opponents never surfaced at the meeting, with every person who offered public comment speaking in favor of the measure.
“Even though this incorrect information was out there, there was no public outcry to keep us from getting these benefits,” she said. “Everybody was in favor of it, and it wasn’t just the gay community: There were people there from community-watch groups, businesses, students, all different folks.”
The vast majority of the 100-plus audience members were wearing “Taxpayer for D.P. Benefits” buttons.
Bradbury noted that the tenor of the meeting was noticeably different from years past, when Allentown was considering, and eventually approved, its LGBT-inclusive nondiscrimination ordinance.
“When we tried to pass that law in 1998, we had about 25 people who spoke in favor of it at the hearing, but there were people there who were just so horrible and spoke so negatively. They said the most disgusting, heinous, prurient things about the gay community, everything from we’re pedophiles to things so horrible I can’t even say. And council just listened to them and even gave credence to some of the things they were saying,” Bradbury said. She noted that the community mobilized to vote out the non-supportive council members and, while the makeup was more sympathetic when the bill was adopted in 2002, there was still a torrent of community backlash that the benefits bill did not see.
The city of Easton is also in the process of considering extending domestic-partner benefits, and Shanker said Allentown’s unanimous action should fuel this effort.
“This sends a strong message that this is not an issue that is divisive,” he said. “This is an issue of basic fairness and equality, and this sends this message to other municipalities that this isn’t something that’s controversial. It’s basic relationship recognition, best practices in human-resources policies and in business policies. It’s not politically divisive, and the unanimous passage shows that, and that should show other municipalities across Pennsylvania that they can and should have the moral fortitude to do this as well.”