At the upcoming Nov. 9 Special Town Meeting (STM), voters will decide whether Harvard should follow the examples of Lowell, Ayer, and several other towns in asking the state for authority to establish its own health insurance plan for town employees. Currently, health insurance agreements are negotiated through collective bargaining with the various employee unions.
While the state of Massachusetts has the authority to establish health insurance plans for its employees, municipalities do not. A state law granting this power to cities and towns (House Bill 2509) failed to pass in the state legislature last summer. The Massachusetts Municipal Association (MMA) has urged towns and cities to seek this authority through home-rule petitions, in hopes of putting pressure on the state to revive the legislation.
Warrant Article 5 does not in itself authorize a new insurance plan. Instead, it authorizes the Board of Selectmen (BOS) to petition the state legislature to grant Harvard home-rule authority. If the petition were granted, Harvard would also be able to join the state’s Group Insurance Commission (GIC). In some cases, plans offered under the GIC are less expensive than those generally available.
In an interview with the Press, Selectwoman Marie Sobalvarro supported the warrant article, saying that towns need the flexibility to deal with rising health insurance costs. She suggested that the BOS might look at the range of plans offered by the nonprofit Massachusetts Interlocal Insurance Association. Under some arrangements, she explained, the town can pick up a share of the co-pay in exchange with employees for lowering premiums.
By far the largest group to be affected by such a change would be teachers at the Bromfield and the Hildreth Elementary schools. In contract negotiations just last year, the Harvard Teachers Association (HTA) agreed to accept the Minuteman Nashoba Health Group’s Rate Saver plan, which has lower premiums but higher co-pays and prescription costs than the previous plan. The town and the teachers shared in the savings from lower premiums; but for some teachers, out-of-pocket payments may be substantially higher than before.
The teachers’ health care package is particularly complex. Under last year’s agreement, the town pays a smaller share of the health insurance premiums for newly hired teachers than for those who were already employed in the district—80 percent rather than 85 percent. For retired teachers, who are covered under a GIC plan, the town pays 90 percent of their premiums.
Bromfield teacher and HTA president Kathleen Doherty notes that Warrant Article 5 would not change the share of premiums covered by the town. Those percentages are set by contract with the HTA and other employee unions. What could change is the content of the insurance package—the conditions that are covered, how much coverage is offered, the size of co-payments, the cost of prescriptions.
Speaking to the School Committee on Nov. 1, Doherty argued that the main goal of Article 5 is to save money, a goal that was already achieved last year when all four unions sat down with the selectmen and the School Committee to negotiate the revised premiums and the Saver plan. “The goals of that article [Article 5] have already been achieved,” she said. “The measure sends an unfortunate message to town employees that the town bargained in bad faith and is looking for ways to circumvent collective bargaining in the future.”
Other groups affected by any change made under Warrant Article 5 include the police, Department of Public Works employees, school staff, Town Hall employees, and library staff. (Many part-time town employees do not receive health-care coverage.)
A less visible factor that may influence the debate at the STM is the declining number of teachers, police, and other town employees who live in Harvard. Dr. Dorothy Andrews, the retired head of the Bromfield science department, recalls that when she began teaching in 1965, most teachers were also town residents. Another retiree, whose teaching career began in the 1970s, estimates that more than 70 percent of faculty and staff of the Harvard schools lived in town. Teachers and staff, along with their spouses and family members, could have constituted a substantial presence at town meeting.
As Harvard’s real estate prices rose in the 1980s and 1990s, the percentage of town employees who lived locally began to fall. Today, only 15 percent of those who teach in the Harvard schools are town residents. Likewise, only two of the nine officers in the Harvard Police Department live in town. Town Clerk Janet Vellante says that she is the only resident now working in the town offices. But she recalled at least three others who were employed when she first arrived.
As a result of this demographic shift, fewer of those who are directly affected by measures such as Warrant Article 5 can cast their votes at Town Meeting.
