Employee benefit plan revised
After receiving feedback and protest from faculty and staff regarding changes to the employee benefits package, Chancellor Nancy Cantor announced revisions to the proposal in an e-mail to those affected Monday.
The main elements of the original proposal that were revised Monday involve the retirement benefits and employee and dependent tuition. The new version of the benefits proposal will be commented on by University Senate committees March 3, and the final proposal will be presented to the Board of Trustees March 11.
The initial proposal was released by the Working Group on Sustainable Benefits on Jan. 22. The release sparked campus debate, and various USen committees examined the budget and proposed changes to Cantor.
‘I think the process is moving along,’ said Robert Vangulick, the Senate Budget Committee representative on the Working Group. ‘There has continued to be a give and take. I don’t believe the process is yet complete.
‘The senate needs to hear from all the committees, and the senate needs to decide if it chooses to make any recommendations as a senate.’
Two proposals were completely removed from the revised plan: choice dollars and the vesting proposal.
The choice dollars program was related to Syracuse University’s contribution to employee retirement. Currently the university contributes 11 percent of employees’ salary to retirement benefits. The original proposal looked to lower the contribution to 9 percent and put 1 percent toward a choice dollars program, which would have allowed employees to determine where to allocate the money.
The Senate Budget Committee took issue with the choice dollars proposal because the 1 percent would be subject to extra taxes not present if kept under retirement contributions. The elimination of the choice dollars program was one of the Senate Budget Committee’s main goals, Vangulick said
‘People were going to end up worse off because of the tax consequences,’ Vangulick said.
Kevin Quinn, SU’s senior vice president of public affairs, said the administration received strong feedback from faculty and staff as well as from the Senate Budget Committee. They advocated for the university to maximize the tax advantage.
Vangulick said the 10 percent contribution is very competitive for junior faculty and about average for senior faculty.
But even if the 10 percent contribution rate remains in line with peer institutions such as Cornell University and New York University, Vangulick said it is important to remember that SU faculty receive a lower salary than faculty at other universities, making the actual contribution to their total retirement a lower dollar amount.
The vesting proposal dealt with the retirement contribution to SU employees working for fewer than six years. SU employees currently receive full retirement contributions owed to them even if they leave before working for six years.
But in the original employee benefits proposal, if someone were to leave the university before six years of employment, they could not receive all of the retirement contributions owed to them.
‘We eliminated the vesting proposal, as faculty and staff cited its adverse impact,’ Quinn said.
In regards to dependent tuition, which allows SU faculty to send their children to SU for free, the new plan will grandfather children of employees who are expected to enroll up until fall 2013. The original proposal only meant to grandfather children entering in fall 2010.
After fall 2013, dependent tuition will depend on the salary employees receive.
Remitted tuition, which allows faculty to take classes as SU, has been restored in full for all employees.
While Vangulick said he appreciated the chancellor’s response to the changes proposed by the Senate Budget Committee, some faculty still think the proposal needs work.
Jeffrey Stonecash, a professor of political science and a former member of the Senate Budget Committee, said the university still needs to provide proof about how the proposed changes will make employee benefits any more ‘sustainable,’ a word used frequently throughout the proposal. He said he does not see any evidence that the costs for retirement and health care are exploding.
Quinn said the rate at which the benefits are increasing makes the current benefits plan unsustainable. Benefit costs at SU and across the nation rose considerably in recent years, especially in the area of health care, Quinn said.
‘If you look at the total costs of all SU benefits, between 2000 and the estimates for next fiscal year, 2011, they will have increased from $61.2 million to $121.4 million, an increase of 98 percent,’ Quinn said. ‘This year alone the university is several millions of dollars above budget for these costs.’
One piece of the proposal Stonecash said he takes issue with was not changed in the revised proposal released Monday. In both versions of the proposal, opposite-sex domestic partners will receive health care.
Stonecash said he does not think it makes sense to raise the cost of health care for some people to give it to others. He believes there will be complications proving unmarried domestic partners are in a relationship and not just in a living situation of convenience.
‘I find this provision where they’re going to raise the cost of health care so they can pay for health care for those who choose not to get married a very strange proposal,’ he said.
Quinn said other universities and businesses offer health care to non-married partners effectively, and SU will have specific requirements and definitions that will make this benefit successful.
The new proposal also introduces two new retirement plan options, the 457(b) plan and a Roth 403(b) plan. Vangulick said these proposals mostly affect employees who are already contributing the maximum amount possible from their salaries toward retirement, which is only a small group of employees.
Aside from the new retirement plans, the tax credit for same-sex partners and the access to the university medical plan for opposite-sex domestic partners, the only two things listed under the ‘Benefit Enhancements’ section of Cantor’s e-mail include the creation of a University Wellness Program and a new childcare initiative.
The senate committees will present their response to the new proposal at a special meeting on March 3. After that meeting, Vangulick said he hopes the senate will develop one collective response to the proposal. So far, only the individual committees have worked on responses.
‘As a longtime believer in the senate, I would hope that nobody would regard the process as having had its full input until the senate itself has had to make an input,’ he said.
Published on February 24, 2010 at 12:00 pm
