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Lawyers question insurance cuts

• Contract defenders in two misdemeanor courts ask why their county health plans are dropped.

Susan McCord

LEESBURG — Lee County employees whose county health insurance was cut last month in a cost-saving measure made their case Tuesday to the Board of Commissioners to have it reinstated.

Patrick Eidson and Hugh Morris work as needed as contract attorneys in Lee County’s probate and magistrate courts, but receive full county health benefits for their families.

“It was a big incentive to take and keep the job,” Morris said.

Lee’s magistrate court, headed by Judge Jim Thurman, hears misdemeanor cases. Its probate court, headed by Judge John Wheaton, hears traffic cases.

Morris said he’d dropped his private insurance plan after enrolling in Lee County’s. After his four-year-old son’s open heart surgery, he feared exclusions for pre-existing conditions if he enrolled in a new policy.

Eidson said he was surprised to hear about his lost insurance.

“We were not given any opportunity to speak before this was done,” he said. “It was kind of slipped under the table.”

He, too, has two small children, and represents approximately 30 clients each month at what he considers a bargain price for Lee County.

Wheaton said the insurance policy was an enticement to keep good lawyers like Morris and Eidson employed in the courts.

“Both Patrick and Hugh do an exceptional job for the volume of cases that we have,” Thurman added. “We don’t have a choice but to have public defenders in both courts.”

Taking away their insurance now is like “changing the rules in the middle of the ball game,” he said.

Thurman also questioned why Morris isn’t working to collect “thousands” in unpaid garbage fees through civil actions as former contract attorney Ray Fajardo was successful at doing.

“It doesn’t seem to me that the county’s using (Morris) to his full potential,” he said.

The policies don’t run out until Jan. 31, Lee County Administrator Alan Ours has said.

The commission took no action on the request during the work session Tuesday.

In other business, Commissioner Ed Duffy said a decision needed to be made on construction of a new fire and emergency medical facility in Lee County’s Smithville- Chokee district.

The board had abandoned plans to staff the new facility by January 2009, but could move forward with acquiring land upon which to build it, once the location of a U.S. Hwy. 19 bypass at Smithville was incorporated into the property’s site description, Ours said.

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