We have been having a little bit of excitement at work the last few weeks. It actually started while I was on vacation so I avoided the stress of it until now. I should probably give you a little of background information so you will understand what happened.

I am fortunate enough to get my health and dental insurance through work. I pay for some of the cost, but the library picks up a good chunk of the expenses. We are actually a private library that gets most of its funding through town moneys. The easiest way to explain it is to say we are sort of like subcontractors. We have been in existence since 1882, and it is easier for the town to pay us to offer the services as we have since than it would be to start a library of its own. That probably sounds weird, but 80% of the libraries in RI fall under that category.

Well, many of the communities in Rhode Island are banding together to get their insurance as a single block. That is good news when it comes to saving money, but it is not so good for us. The problem is that the block is only allowing municipal workers to get their insurance through it, which means we might be out of luck.

Our director took the news pretty bad since it was not something that he had gotten any clue about. The good news is that we have until July 1 (the new fiscal year) to sort things out and find a new insurance company. The bad news is that it probably won't be as good. We only have 7 full-time employees so you can probably guess that our group won't have that great of savings over individual plans. He is hopeful, though.

The good news is the town manager has gone to the block to see if we might be brought in anyway. While we are not directly municipal employees, all of the funding for our salaries (and our benefits) comes through the budget we get from the town. In fact, like the municipal employees, our salaries are listed in the annual budget every year by our titles. Because there is only one of each of our titles in the town, everyone pretty much knows exactly how much each of us makes. The hope is that will be enough to convince the block to allow us to stay on the rolls of the town's insurance group. The ironic thing is that the town will have to probably increase our budget to pay for the more expensive insurance if we have to go it alone.

On the other side of things, if we are allowed to join the block insurance, the deductions from my check will probably go down a bit since the insurance will actually end up costing less overall.

I guess it is really a funny situation. It can either be pretty bad or it could end up being good news overall.