4/3 Weekly Email

Hi all,

Scholarship: As a reminder, our annual college scholarship program closes on Friday, April 18th, at midnight. Applicants have a little more than 2 weeks to complete their application and submit - we will begin reviewing submissions immediately after the portal closes. 

Elections: Nominations for our 2025 elections will be open in late April. Members will have several weeks to nominate themselves or their peers for various roles. An election committee (composed entirely of members who do not sit on the UAEA Board) will review nominations, determine eligibility, and contact applicants to confirm interest. Once the nomination period has closed we will announce all eligible candidates and provide additional details on the elections process. Our intention is to finish elections as early as possible in June - the voting period will likely be during the first week of June. We understand that some members may be on vacation during this period and will make arrangements to send voting links to personal emails if you inform us ahead of time. 

Member Meeting: Our next membership meeting will be on Thursday, April 17th, from 12-1pm at the Kiwanis Recreation Center. Find more details (and a Google Calendar event) here. We have a lot going on and will probably treat this meeting as an extended Q+A for members  - if you can’t make it, I’ll publish our meeting minutes (and member questions) in my normal weekly update. Please rsvp here by Tuesday, April 15th at 5pm. 

Open Enrollment: You may have seen some emails from HR discussing benefits enrollment from May 5th to May 23rd. Please note that this year will be active enrollment, meaning you will need to sign your spouse and dependents up again. All of their information previously entered will be in the portal already - you’ll just need to verify that they still need coverage. If your dependents’ information was already entered, it shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes to update your enrollment, something which can be done during the workday on City time. 

HR explained the need for an active enrollment year to the employee associations a few weeks back - they have repeatedly found examples of employees who were accidentally still paying for insurance coverage for people they did not want to cover - one example that has occurred a few times is employees paying for spouses who they divorced several years prior. Employees are required to inform HR of personal changes that impact insurance coverage - UAEA has had to defend a few people in the past few years whose failure to update their dependents’ status has caused the City to pay out large amounts to cover medical benefits. We support this active enrollment requirement as a way to both avoid future disciplines and reduce our total healthcare costs. 

6-Sided Partnership: Our quarterly 6-sided partnership meeting is occurring on April 16th. If you don’t know what that is, check out our Q+A webpage. This is an opportunity to discuss employee concerns or proposals with the other employee groups, HR, and the Strategic Management team. Discussions are limited to things that impact multiple employee groups - one topic we’ll be returning to, for instance, is the closure of at least one shared employee gym and what the City will do to help make up for it. If you have any topics you’d like me to discuss, please send them over by Friday, April 11th, at 5PM. 

I will also be participating in a 2-day workshop on April 16th and 17th which will explore the last Employee Survey and make recommendations for ways to address employee concerns. UAEA has a few ideas already but we’re open to more feedback - feel free to send suggestions to president@uaeatempe.com. I will keep every suggestion anonymous unless you would like credit for your ideas. 

Thanks for a great week, everyone!