County employees will see some changes to the supplemental insurance policies available to them this month during the county’s open enrollment period.

Carter County Finance Director Brad Burke informed members of the Financial Management Committee of the changes on Wednesday morning. Currently, several companies offer supplemental insurance policies — such as short-term disability, cancer coverage, hospitalization policy, and salary recovery policies — to county employees.

With the changes, the county will cease offering group coverage with payroll deductions with some of those agencies and instead provide similar products through a different set of providers.

“The employees can still get these same benefits at the same cost,” Burke told the Committee. “The only thing is instead of it being withheld from their paycheck, it will be an auto draft from their bank account. No one is losing anything.”

Employees can choose to keep the plans they currently have and set up payment arrangements with the individual company or they can opt to take a policy with the new providers and still have the premium deducted from their payroll. Deputy Finance Director Michael Kennedy said all the employees will be guaranteed coverage through the new providers.

Kennedy said only a small number of the county’s employees have policies through the companies which are being dropped.

One of the issues that led to the changes was problems with billing and account reconciliation with some of the companies, particularly with Aflack, Kennedy said.

“There was a problem with Aflac billing us correctly,” Kennedy said.

One of the problems with Aflac, according to Kennedy, is the agent signed county employees up for a policy during enrollment and the county began payroll deductions of the premiums. However, he said the agent failed to update the Aflac records and create accounts for the employees. County employees were paying premiums for policies they essentially didn’t have because Aflac failed to update their accounts, Kennedy said.

Financial Management Committee Chairman Danny Ward said he received several calls from county employees who had received letters from Aflac stating their policies were going to be canceled because the county was withholding their payments. Ward took issue with Kennedy’s withholding of the payments, saying he put the employee’s policies at risk.

According to Kennedy, he withheld payment from Aflac because the bills the company was remitting to the county were not correct and they were not correctly handling the employees’ accounts.

“I’m not going to pay a bill that is not correct,” Kennedy said. “They finally did correct it because I did hold it back. That was the only hand I had to play to get them to correct the problem.”

In other business, discussion during the meeting turned heated after a committee member asked questions about a bid for window replacement at a county school.

Committee member Commissioner Charles VonCannon asked Carter County Director of Schools Dr. Kevin Ward about the window replacements. Ward said the school system was working to replace old single-pane windows with new double-pane windows. Some of the windows set for replacement are as much as 50 years old, while in others are windows that were previously broken and plexiglass installed.

Carter County Mayor Leon Humphrey asked Ward about the school system’s long-range capital improvements plan. Humphrey said the county has been asking the school system to complete the long-range plan for eight years, and the school system has failed to do so.

“Until you get that long-range capital improvements plan in place I am opposed to spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to put band-aids on these old buildings,” Humphrey said. “It’s a waste of taxpayers money.”

Ward responded that the school system evaluates these upgrade projects to look at cost savings as well as how much longer the building will be in use.

“There are some things you do to make the climate better in these classrooms for these children to keep the cold drafts from blowing in on them,” Ward said.

Humphrey said he believes the school system should develop the long-range plan and asked why the Board had not done that yet. Ward said a new Carter County Board of Education would be seated in the August election and that was something the new Board could look at after they take office. He noted the there will be a vacancy on the Board which will need to be filled by appointment after Sept. 1 due to current Board Chairman Rusty Barnett being selected as the Republican nominee for Carter County Mayor and being currently unopposed in the August General Election.

“There were no vacancies eight years ago when we asked for this,” Humphrey said. “Why wasn’t it done?”

Ward said the school system had looked at a long-range plan to address needs at three elementary schools by constructing a new middle school to serve Hunter, Unaka, and Keenburg.

“The excuse to put us off was always wanting this big comprehensive plan that you could never afford or fund,” Ward said. “If we had some help and support we could be moving forward instead of bringing people to a meeting with basically a powerpoint presentation to kill that school. You had your real estate guy up there talking about the planes flying over and how close we were to a beer store. The concept up there would have taken care of one district.”