County Judge Clay Jenkins
Faced with a $35 million budget shortfall, Dallas County is unlikely to begin offering benefits to the domestic partners of gay and lesbian employees as part of its 2012 budget, a county spokeswoman said last week.
County Judge Clay Jenkins, who chairs the Commissioners Court, has said he supports offering domestic partner benefits. The Commissioners Court, which has a Democratic majority for the first time in decades, voted earlier this year to add LGBT employees to the county’s nondiscrimination policy.
But Dallas County spokeswoman Maria Arita said last week it costs the county an additional $3,552 for every spouse added to an employee’s health insurance. And according to the Dallas Morning News, the county is already proposing to cut $5.6 million in employee health care costs in 2012.
“It really does come down to dollars and cents,” Arita told Instant Tea. “He [Jenkins] likes equality in the workplace in every way for every employee. There’s just no equivocating about that, plain and simple, and if it were possible to offer all benefits to all employees … then he would do that.”
Jenkins is scheduled to discuss the issue further in an interview with Instant Tea on Wednesday.
The city of Dallas has offered DP benefits since 2004, and Fort Worth added them last year.
Of course, Price has nothing better to do then to be a fake phony and other things. Y’all won’t care about the broken system, but yet care about Gay stuff.
@ preppystudent, this is an LGBT paper after all. Seems perfectly correct that it should “care about Gay stuff”. Back to the article’s subject. With so many people not getting married these days, I’m talking about the hetro community, seems like offering DP benefits should be the norm by now. Less and less people are choosing to get married and instead just live together, I guess they realize that the marriage statistics are not in their favor and the relationship has a better chance of ending in divorce that succeeding. Just sayin.
Theres just other issues that we have to deal with, 1st recalling some of theses jokers in office. Clay and JWP
I would agree that we need to get rid of JWP. We should have done that years ago, in my humble opinion. I’ve got no problem with Jenkins. Is there something I’m missing about him that I should be aware of?
Pretty much a Price Puppet