DANA POINT : Park Board Trustee Opposes Health Plan

A trustee of the Capistrano Bay Park and Recreation District lashed out at his fellow board members Monday for voting themselves health benefits at the taxpayers’ expense.

Trustee Mike Reed said he is “adamantly opposed” to making taxpayers foot the bill for health insurance for board members. Reed, the sole district trustee to vote against the benefits, is demanding that the board reconsider its decision at its meeting Thursday night.

“I don’t believe that it is right for the taxpayers to pick up health insurance benefits, at a considerable expense, for elected officials of a small board like ours that meets two times a month,” said Reed, who is faculty adviser to the Lariat, the Saddleback College newspaper. “We already receive a $100 stipend per meeting. If a board member wants health insurance, he could use the stipend for that.”

The five-member board, which oversees 20 parks and a multitude of recreation programs in a 6-square-mile district encompassing the city of Dana Point, voted 4 to 1 on Nov. 7 to approve a new insurance package for all district employees and their dependents and included health insurance benefits for themselves. It was the first time in the 26-year history of the district that trustees voted themselves a health plan.

Trustee Ed Conway, who voted to approve the new package, said the benefits are common in other districts.

“This came only after a committee studied the matter,” said Conway, a Dana Point realtor. “The committee suggested that the majority of similar districts and city councils of our magnitude budgetwise offer such things as this.”

The annual budget for the district, which recently gained the posh Monarch Beach area, more than quadrupled in the past few years to $5.5 million, Reed said. The district trustees who oversee that budget are elected by Dana Point residents and serve four-year terms.

Trustee Lynn Muir, one of the founding members of the district in 1965, called the new package “nothing out of the ordinary.” He and trustee Robert Wilberg made up the committee that studied the new health package after surveying 35 other districts.

“If people look at this on its merits, it is a good decision,” said Muir, a local architect who said he will not apply for the benefits for himself. “This is for the good of the district in the long run.”

Specific costs for the new package were not available, but Muir said that adding the trustees to the plan would cost “less than $1,000 a year for each of us.”

Muir said part of the reason for altering the district’s insurance package now is to add health benefits for dependents of the district’s 11 full-time employees. Adding the five board members to the final package will still give the district “a better insurance package overall,” Muir said.

Reed said he agreed that dependents of the employees should be covered. But when he suggested that the board vote on the dependents’ benefits separately from the trustees, his motion died on a 3-2 vote.

“I consider my work on this board a community service,” Reed said. “I was brought up to believe that way. This just isn’t right.”