Lehigh County could become the seventh jurisdiction in the state to offer health benefits to same-sex partners of county employees.
County executive Matt Croslis included a stipulation in his recent budget proposal that would extend the same benefits to same-sex couples legally married in a jurisdiction that sanctions marriage equality that heterosexual married couples receive.
Currently, Philadelphia, Allentown, Easton, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg and State College offer benefits to same-sex partners of employees, although those programs extend to nonmarried same-sex domestic partners, while the proposed Lehigh County measure would be limited to legally married couples.
Lehigh County is located in Southeastern Pennsylvania and encompasses cities such as Allentown and Bethlehem.
The county’s nine-member board of commissioners, comprised of seven Republicans and two Democrats, was scheduled to discuss the issue Oct. 9.
At that point, commissioners could, with a five-vote majority, amend the budget, and the modified proposal would come up for its final vote two weeks later. Then, Croslis could chose to approve or veto the measure.
Croslis told PGN Tuesday that he wanted to wait and see how the discussion would play out before deciding how to handle the possible elimination of his benefits proposal.
“I don’t know yet because there are other options,” he said. “I have to take the budget as a whole. I have to worry about a couple hundred-thousand people and how the budget is going to affect them. So I have to wait and see what happens before I decide.”
Croslis told PGN he believes he has the authority to issue an executive order to mandate the benefits, but said he would prefer to make the change with the approval of the county commissioners if possible.
Also factoring into that discussion was the fact that Croslis is a temporary appointee to the executive position; he was appointed by the commissioners in June to carry out the term of the late former executive Bill Hansell, and his term will expire in January.
“I didn’t want to get accused of doing anything behind the scenes, so I wanted to make sure to put it out there for discussion,” he said. “And I chose to do it this way because I think this is the best shot at getting it to last.”
Before Wednesday’s meeting, one commissioner already had taken issue with the idea.
Lehigh County Commissioner Tom Creighton said he planned to propose an amendment to the budget to eliminate Croslis’ same-sex partner proposal. In an interview with The Morning Call, Creighton suggested that the move could lead to the county “giving money out to people’s pets or whatever.”
“I’m hoping he misspoke,” Croslis said about Creighton’s comment. “I just don’t think that has any place in this discussion.”
Creighton spoke out against the allocation of $219,000 for the benefits program — in the total $361.7-million budget — but Croslis said the actual figure would likely not exceed $50,000, and could even be nothing.
Lehigh County has 2,027 employees, and Croslis noted that a nearby health network with 10,000 employees reported signing up 20 same-sex partners after adopting a similar measure.
“That [$219,000] was a pure estimate,” Croslis said. “We’re self-insured so if nobody chose to accept the benefits, it could actually be zero. But we can’t have any idea of how many people would use it because you can’t exactly go and survey people.”
Croslis said he is hopeful that the policy can come to fruition, noting it is a simple but needed change.
“It came to my attention as we were going through the budget stuff that our health-benefits policy had language in there that said you can get coverage and benefits for a spouse if you’re legally married to a person of the opposite sex. When I saw ‘to a person of the opposite sex,’ I thought, that’s kind of absurd, and it’s discriminatory. So we should eliminate those last couple words. If you’re legally married, your spouse should get benefits. It’s that simple.”