BETHEL – After nearly a three-year wait, Bethel municipal employees got a benefits package, but it won’t be implemented until Jan. 1.

At last week’s selectmen’s meeting, Town Manager Scott Cole accepted blame for the lengthy delay in front of 13 of the town’s 19 employees. They said they were fed up with the wait.

“Our beef was with Scott Cole and not with the selectmen,” said employees’ spokeswoman Nesta Littlefield. Littlefield is the town’s finance officer.

“We felt that we would sit in a body, and by it, say, ‘We mean business,'” she said Thursday.

Although the benefits package was listed as a cafeteria plan in Cole’s Nov. 14 memo to selectmen, it doesn’t offer a cash-out option to employees who don’t want the insurance deal.

Instead, the package is a flexible spending plan. It allows employees to use pre-tax dollars in conjunction with a premium-only pre-tax deduction, Cole said.

Littlefield said it gives employees the opportunity to use allowances and put more of their own pre-tax pay into a flexible spending account if they so choose.

“The employees seem to think that’s better than nothing,” she added.

Cole said he and selectmen did attempt to get a Section 125 cafeteria plan in place, but quickly ran into problems.

“We were trying to come up with a satisfactory legal review, but we have stumbled over the allocation of a block of money to be spent on the premium. I’ve been stumbling for a year or two to get this thing lined up, but there was a disconnect between selectmen and the town lawyer,” he said.

Since then, selectmen and Cole have realized they couldn’t make the cafeteria plan work the way they tried to do it.

“I was trying to find the best way for the employees because we’re trying to do the right thing by everybody,” he added.

Before 2001, the town offered its employees 100 percent town-financed health insurance coverage for employees and dependents. From 2001 forward, only employees who had family coverage were allowed to keep it, at town expense, Cole said.

But pre-2001 single-coverage employees and new hires couldn’t get their families enrolled at town expense because selectmen closed the door after realizing the town could no longer afford paying 100 percent.

Additionally, since then, each time insurance costs rose, the town and its employees had to split the increase 50-50.

In June, selectmen authorized a one-time payment to employees for allowances that had been programmed for insertion into flexible savings accounts. Paid out as taxable wages, it was retroactive to April 16, 2001, Cole said.

“Now we’re moving forward with a system of flexible spending accounts for non-insurance covered medical, dental and dependent care costs,” he added.

Sixteen of the town’s 19 employees participate in the benefits package.

“It’s been a long time coming and they’ll now have something in place that they can use,” Littlefield said.

tkarkos@sunjournal.com

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