Olathe retirees’ premiums spike after city lowers contribution: ‘Just furious‘
When Brian Wessling retired in 2018 after more than 30 years in the Olathe Police Department, he made his retirement plans around the city’s robust benefits package.
Now, the benefits — and the city’s contributions to them — that he had planned his life around are changing.
“Olathe’s salaries when we were employed were never the highest, and we didn’t expect that because our benefits were better than Lenexa or Overland Park,” Wessling said about himself and fellow public safety retirees.
When Olathe was trying to recruit more employees in the late 1980s, the city decided that it would pay retiree health care costs for those that retired from city work to assist employees when their income is reduced until they qualified for Medicare at age 65. It changed course in 2005, introducing a tiered system that adjusted the city’s contribution according to a few different plan options, but the city still handled the majority of the cost.
“Even though I retired in 2018, for the last seven years I was paying the exact same thing (in premiums that) a patrol officer was paying,” Wessling said.
But this year presented a change for Wessling and more than 100 other retirees, several of whom are former public safety employees, who saw a significant increase in their health insurance costs.
“I was paying about $70 a month for health care. When they did open enrollment (this year) mine went up to $494 per month — our rates jumped over 500%. That doesn’t make sense, that’s not what they promised us,” Wessling said.
The increases came this year as the city reduced its contributions to retiree health insurance plans as it grappled with rising and fluctuating health care costs, with both current employees and retirees seeing increases. But as former employees planned their retirement around the city’s benefits package that had been in place for 20 years, the price changes came as a shock.
The city pulled back its contributions to 50% of the premium for only certain plans that cover an individual, according to the city’s website. The retiree will be responsible for the remaining cost for family, spouse, or children.
With the coverage changes, retirees can see prices at $494 or more than $1,000 for a single person.
If their plan covers a family or spouse, prices can range between $1,600 to a little over $3,000 per month, depending on the plan.
“People were just furious. I had people calling me and they were crying, they didn’t know what they were going to do financially,” Wessling said.
To help retirees grapple with these changes, the city is offering $250 stipends to help with the monthly costs coming in 2026 and extending the open enrollment period until Dec. 3 to give residents more time to make their decisions.
But Wessling worries about how this will impact the retirement decisions of other employees.
“Everybody is still concerned,” he said. “In our opinion, $250 is a bandaid approach. We’re not going to turn it down, it’s something to help with pain and hardship, but this is not going to take care of the issue promised to us for our entire careers.”
Olathe’s benefits plan
The changes caused several retirees to speak during public comment at the Nov. 4 City Council meeting — many of whom served in either the fire or police departments — sharing their concerns about how the cost changes could hurt as they live on fixed incomes.
“The monthly amount of $494 worries us and it’s very stressful,” retired police officer Damon Bell said on behalf of himself and his wife, Gina, who also worked at the Olathe Police Department. “Ever since we were made aware of the 2026 cost increase, we are trying to figure out how we can afford it. With retirement, you are on a fixed income and retirement checks don’t go up.”
“Some of us work additional jobs to help with bills. With this hike, this has us retirees worried. …We are going to have to pay over $1,000 a month and to be honest, this is scary.”
Olathe’s public safety employees are feeling the brunt of this change because they can retire in their 50s under the Kansas Police and Firefighter pension plan.
“Being a police officer and a firefighter is a young man’s game,” said Todd Hart, a retired deputy fire chief. “You don’t want an officer driving around at 60 years old.”
Since they don’t qualify for Medicare until 65, many Olathe public safety retirees rely on the city’s coverage until they qualify for the federal health insurance program.
Recognizing this, Olathe crafted its insurance plans in 1988 to allow city employees to remain on the city’s health care insurance plans at the same rate until employees turned 65 as part of its recruiting efforts, city spokesperson Kennedy said.
This stayed intact until 2005, when the city switched to a tiered system of retiree health care benefits that was based on hiring dates and retiring dates.
Hart, who started his career with the fire department in 1986, operated a retiree task force as the city made changes to its benefits package in 2005. While the changes took away some of the original benefits, employees who were hired before Jan. 1, 2004 continued to receive 100% contributions since that was the plan they based their retirement plans around, he said.
Hart said he wished there was a similar system in place to grandfather in the retirees facing this year’s changes.
“These costs are all able to be budgeted because every one of us that’s retired is going to fall off at the age of 65, anyway,” he said. “I’ve been gone since 2017 and you’re giving me a 500% increase two-and-a-half years before I’m eligible for (Medicare). … It’s just not right. It’s not fair.”
While he used to provide coverage for his wife at $1,183 per month, the new plans priced him out at $1,700 per month — causing him to take his wife off of his plan for the next three years until she qualifies for Medicare, he said.
“I loved working for the city of Olathe, I loved being a fireman, I loved running the calls. I loved helping the citizens and to find out, basically, that you’re just a number on a spreadsheet … is cold and heartless and it’s not what the city of Olathe says they stand for,” Hart said.
“Why would you take such a hard line, cruel approach to how you deal with the people that worked there 30, 35 years and just go back on the promises that you made?”
Pushing off retirement
Olathe Police Officer Eric Hardman told City Council members in early November that he joined the city because of how it took care of its retirees. But he submitted the required paperwork to retire before the increases came to fruition.
“Had I known the city would have increased its medical requirements, I would have pushed back my retirement,” Hardman said.
Fellow retired officer Wessling said he worries these increases will cause others to push off their retirement.
“Now you’re going to start having older officers and older firemen staying on the job until they’re 64 … or once they turn 65 and that causes several problems,” Wessling said.
“It would be hard for me to do some of the stuff that I did in my younger days on the Olathe Police Department, and unfortunately getting into physical altercations is, you know, just doing one of the the actual duties of the job.”
But he said he still holds out hope for improvement.
“We’re hoping the City Council is on board. We’re going to have a new city manager coming up soon,” he said. “I think we’re going to try to request a meeting with the new city manager and talk to them and hopefully the City Council is on board to keep retiree health insurance like they promised.”
