By Steve Plunkett
One of the first things the Boca Raton City Council may consider when it returns from its summer break Aug. 26 is whether to offer health insurance and other benefits to same-sex partners of city employees.
Council member Constance Scott pushed for the city attorney to research that issue as well as the mechanics of adding sexual orientation and gender identity to Boca Raton’s equal employment opportunity criteria.
“We have documentation … There are two cities in Palm Beach County that currently have these ordinances and resolutions in place, so we’re not reinventing the wheel,” Scott said at the July 9 meeting.
At the council’s workshop the day before, Rand Hoch of the nonprofit, nongovernmental Palm Beach County Human Rights Council gave Scott and her colleagues a list of governments in the county that give benefits to domestic partners. On the list were the county, the School Board, West Palm Beach and Wellington.
“You have taken steps to isolate the LGBT community,” Hoch said. “You are the only public officials in the United States this century to deny LGBT employees the right to redress in case they have been discriminated against in employment.”
The Human Rights Council started lobbying Boca Raton nine months ago after the city refused to sign a $1.2 million hazardous waste cleanup agreement because it included an LGBT-inclusive nondiscrimination clause.
Council member Anthony Majhess said he thought the issue should be taken up at the state or federal level or decided by referendum.
“This is more part of a social issue,” Majhess said he told Hoch after the workshop. “To go beyond what the state does and what the national government does, I feel would be personally using this seat for purposes of activism.”
Scott disagreed. “I don’t see this as a referendum issue. I see this as something that we as policy makers have the right and have the authority to move forward on,” she said.
Council member Michael Mullaugh joined Majhess in asking the city to seek an opinion from the state attorney general on the legality of domestic partners getting benefits following a 2008 constitutional amendment that defines marriage as the legal union of one man and one woman.
In mid-August, employees of Florida Atlantic University will become eligible to participate in a domestic partner health insurance program, Hoch announced July 17. The University of Florida began offering benefits to domestic partners in 2006, he said.
The Palm Beach Town Council scheduled an Aug. 13 vote on whether to offer domestic partnership benefits to employees with same-sex partners, Hoch also said.
An insurance consultant recommended offering the benefits to make the town as competitive as possible for recruiting talented workers. But town staff recommended against it because it would cost $72,510 a year extra.
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