After weeks of debate and several last-minute revisions Wednesday night, the Metro Council passed a slew of changes to health insurance plans with major hikes to premiums for roughly 4,000 East Baton Rouge Parish employees, as the city-parish tries to weather booming healthcare costs.
Employees who want to keep their current plans in 2027 will need to pay 15% to 25% more every two weeks — down from previous proposals that included increases of 50%, 40% and 20% — or they can switch to a narrower network with lower costs.
“Sometimes there’s a battle between a spreadsheet and the heart,” Mayor-President Sid Edwards said about the tough-to-stomach rate increases. “Everybody wants to do right by our employees.”
Edwards and some council members characterized the steep changes as a tough but necessary pill to swallow, expecting the changes to bring some whiplash to employees that would only get worse if they were put off longer.
“Based upon everything that I know, we will be here in 2027 having a much harder conversation if we say no,” council member Jen Racca said before the vote. “None of us want to make this change tonight. But what do we do?”
The council’s vote on the mayor’s proposal was originally set to take place a week earlier, but was delayed to this week as it became clear the proposal would not be approved amid pushback from city-parish firefighter and police unions.
Even the final rates voted on Wednesday were adjusted from what was on the agenda. The council originally was set to approve 20% to 30% rate increases, but council member Aaron Moak made an amendment for 15% to 25% rate hikes.
Council member Aaron Moak, District 4, speaks during the Metro Council meeting on Wednesday, August 27, 2025.
Several votes were held before a majority approved the amended rate.
Council members Laurie Adams, Denise Amoroso, Carolyn Coleman, Rowdy Gaudet, Twahna P. Harris, Dwight Hudson, Brandon Noel, Moak and Racca voted to approve. Darryl Hurst and Anthony Kenney were not present when the vote was held. Cleve Dunn Jr. did not vote.
Firefighter Association President Jake Morgan said last week that his union should have been part of the earlier conversations with the Mayor’s Office about possible plan changes.
The mayor disagreed that the fire union wasn’t at the table in the early stages but said the delayed vote gave the city-parish’s insurance consultants a chance to meet with union members and present the proposed changes.
Prior to the vote Wednesday, Morgan lobbied the council to amend the proposal and soften the hikes to a 10% increase rather than 20%.
“We’re all family men and women,” Morgan said. “We have kids. We have to provide for them. And now we’re talking hundreds of dollars a month, not just a couple bucks.”
Deductibles for single employees will be raised by $400, while workers with families on their plans will have deductibles raised by $1,200, about an 80% increase.
Even by lowering the increases down to 15% from the much higher proposals, the healthcare hikes present sticker shock to employees throughout the parish.
In May, the council passed a 3% salary increase for most employees in the city-parish. For workers at lower pay scales who want to stay on their insurance plan, the increased insurance cost would significantly eat into those raises.
“During the pay raise, if some of y’all were here then, I think y’all probably saw some of us up here sitting with grim faces in what was a very excited and happy room,” council member Adams said. “It’s because we knew that at some point adjustments were going to have to be made.”
But not everyone received that raise. District Attorney Hillar Moore wrote a letter to council members last week as they weighed imposing new insurance rates and plans, pointing out that his employees were some of the few who didn’t receive salary increases but would be forced to pay more for insurance or switch to a narrower network.
Over the past week, Edwards and several council members said the city-parish had done a poor job over the years keeping up with inflation and rising insurance costs, raising premiums only a few times in the past decade.
“If we had incrementally done it, we wouldn’t be in this situation,” the mayor said.
