Genoa renews Ohio Plan health insurance; drops Aetna Dental for Delta Dental

By LENNY C. LEPOLA

News Assis­tant Man­ag­ing Editor

Last year Genoa Town­ship moved to the Ohio Plan for employee health insur­ance cov­er­age, and Genoa’s Human Resource Spe­cial­ist Linda Greco said the Ohio Plan has been, in her words, very good to Genoa Township.

Greco was in cham­bers dur­ing last Thurs­day evening’s Genoa Town­ship Board of Trustees meet­ing to make a pitch for renew­ing Ohio Plan health insur­ance cov­er­age for 2013. Greco also rec­om­mended mov­ing den­tal cov­er­age from Aetna to Delta Dental.

“When we moved to the Ohio Plan last year they put a 10 per­cent increase cap on for the sec­ond year,” Greco said. “We looked at other car­ri­ers but they were not able to meet that 10 per­cent, which is well below other proposals.”

Greco said town­ship employ­ees would be on a $1,500 sin­gle and $3,000 fam­ily deductible plan, with HSA mem­bers receiv­ing $1,200 and $2,400 respectively.

Aetna’s den­tal plan increase was 18.36 per­cent, Greco said, com­pared to a Delta Den­tal 2-year rate locked at 4.64 per­cent increase per year.

The trustees approved both of Greco’s recommendations.

The trustees also approved Greco’s rec­om­men­da­tion to allow employ­ees to add chil­dren up to the age of 28 to their health insur­ance cov­er­age for a $172.48 monthly pre­mium, with the cost passed along to the employee.

“This is a great ben­e­fit for employ­ees with chil­dren in school, or an adult child who is work­ing, but with no access to insur­ance,” Greco said.

Vision care and life insur­ance pro­grams and pre­mi­ums remain unchanged, Greco said. Vision care is in the sec­ond year of a four-year rate lock with a monthly pre­mium of $12.03 per employee; and life insur­ance is in the sec­ond year of a three-year rate lock with a monthly pre­mium of $10.50 per employee and $2.20 depen­dent coverage.

In other busi­ness, Genoa PD Chief Robert Tay­lor asked the trustees to approve spend­ing $5,820 from the seizure trust fund for new duty gear from Vance Law Enforcement.

“We bought the cur­rent syn­thetic leather duty gear 12 years ago,” Tay­lor said. “It looked good, but it’s not as durable as we thought it would be. It’s costly to replace and looks terrible.”

Tay­lor said the replace­ment duty gear — hand­cuff car­ri­ers, mag­a­zine pouches, duty belts, spray hold­ers, baton hold­ers – would be high qual­ity leather.

The trustees approved the pur­chase request; Tay­lor thanked local drug deal­ers for their invol­un­tary con­tri­bu­tions to the seizure trust fund.

The trustees briefly dis­cussed unheated stor­age facil­i­ties for the town­ship main­te­nance and safety ser­vices com­plex on Big Wal­nut Road.

Town­ship Admin­is­tra­tor Paul Wise and Devel­op­ment & Zon­ing Direc­tor Joe Clase described two struc­tures arranged in an L shape behind the town­ship salt barn – one approx­i­mately 7,500 square feet, the other 4.375 square feet – about 12,000 square feet total of stor­age space.

Clase said the cost for the pole struc­tures would be $15 per square foot for just the build­ings with­out con­crete; the town­ship main­te­nance depart­ment, as a cost sav­ings mea­sure, could pour the con­crete floors.

Clase esti­mated that the two struc­tures would cost between $350,000 and $400,000, includ­ing con­crete and 14-foot doors. The project would be funded through the var­i­ous town­ship depart­ments based on square-foot usage.

“We store a lot of things out­side and that makes them depre­ci­ate much faster,” Wise said. “Hav­ing an indoor stor­age area will also make our safety ser­vice and main­te­nance com­plex look a lot bet­ter. We’ll look at this dur­ing the next bud­get cycle and put it out to bid.”

The trustees approved the pur­chase of a 2012 Case CX36B Mini Trac Hoe for $41,000.

Town­ship Main­te­nance Super­vi­sor Bob Math­ews said the town­ship cur­rently rents a mini trac hoe at $225 per day for open­ing and clos­ing graves 30 to 40 times each year. Math­ews said each grave open­ing and clos­ing is a two-day rental – one day to open the grave, the next day to close.

The Case CX36B should have a 20-year life span, Math­ews said; pay back in town­ship sav­ings would be 2 1/2 years. Math­ews also noted that nearby town­ships had expressed an inter­est in rent­ing the unit at $100 per day, short­en­ing the pay­back time.

Misti Spill­man was in cham­bers to request per­mis­sion to restore and repair head­stones in Red Bank Ceme­tery. Spill­man said she would hold a work­shop to demon­strate proper tech­niques in ceme­tery restora­tion and con­tin­u­ing her effort to restore and repair dam­aged headstones.

The trustees approved apply­ing for Recre­ational Trail Pro­gram and Clean Ohio Trail Fund grant funds to assist with fund­ing a resur­fac­ing of the Genoa Trail in 2014–15.

The trustees accepted $4,048.30 from the State of Ohio for a haz­mat decon­t­a­m­i­na­tion roller sys­tem; and $1,120.01 from the Aladdin Shriners Hos­pi­tal Asso­ci­a­tion for Chil­dren, Inc. for one pedi­atric immo­bi­liza­tion sys­tem and two pedi­atric vac­uum mat­tress systems.

The trustees reap­pointed John Her­chl to the Genoa Town­ship Parks Advi­sory Board with a term expir­ing March 31, 2015.

Admin­is­tra­tor Paul Wise said the 2013 Genoa Town­ship Work­place Cam­paign for the United Way of Delaware County resulted in $1,334 in con­tri­bu­tions. The trustees thanked every­one who participated.

The next reg­u­larly sched­uled Genoa Town­ship Board of Trustees meet­ing is at 7 p.m. on Thurs­day, Jan­u­ary 3, 2013, at the Genoa Town­ship Hall, 5111 South Old 3C High­way, Westerville.

An updated list of Genoa Town­ship meet­ings is avail­able on the town­ship web­site at < genoatwp.com >.

Posted by Gary Henery on Dec 12 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.