University of Tampa offers same-sex partnership benefits to employees
January 29, 2009 at 8:58 am by Wayne GarciaThe change in UT policy was announced to the campus in an e-mail Wednesday: the downtown Tampa university has done what Hillsborough County government couldn’t do in offering domestic partners of homosexual employees insurance and other benefits.
The campus newspaper, The Minaret, reports:
A week after Hillsborough County commissioners shot down a similar idea and two months after Florida voters rejected gay marriage, the University of Tampa agreed Wednesday to begin offering domestic partner benefits for homosexual couples.
Beginning April 1, UT will allow same-sex domestic partners to secure health insurance and other employee benefits. The offer does not apply to heterosexual domestic partnerships because those couples are allowed to marry under state law.
“It’s about time,” said Matt Gould, president of the Gay Lesbian Transgender Straight Bisexual Alliance, a UT student group. “I think it’s great that UT is implementing [benefits], but I think it’s wrong that the entire county won’t.”
The paper said that faculty and students had long pushed for domestic-partnership benefits but UT President Ronald Vaughn had not acted on those requests until now:
In December 2007, The Minaret reported faculty dissatisfaction with the lack of benefits at UT, characterizing the quest for same-sex benefits as “a 15-year administrative shell game in which the biggest losers are progress, equal rights and the university’s reputation.”
Faculty voted twice in four years to endorse the benefits but claimed their requests were being ignored by President Ronald L. Vaughn.
UT’s new benefit plan was announced Wednesday in an e-mail to faculty members:
“The decision to offer same-sex domestic partner benefits was made after a lengthy, thorough and deliberate analysis. In 2008, the University hired an independent consulting firm, Sibson Consulting, to analyze issues and assess the feasibility of offering benefits to domestic partners.”
Here is The Minaret story in full, and here is CL’s coverage of the issue at the Hillsborough County government: Commission aide helped anti-gay group; Study attempt fails on 5-2 vote; Blair, CIC take aim at Beckner proposal; and Beckner: Let’s study domestic partner benefits.
