CONNEAUT — City administrators and Conneaut’s insurance provider are sharpening pencils to find ways to cut the city’s sizable medical insurance bill, City Council learned at Monday’s work session.

Finance Director John Williams and representatives from Joslin-Landis Insurance of Conneaut are working to provide the cash-strapped city some relief. “We’re always concerned about the cost to the city,” said Tammy Ringer, a Joslin-Landis representative.

The city is enrolled with Anthem Blue Cross/Blue Shield, but its business is being shopped to other carriers, Ringer said. “It’s a team approach,” she said.

Council is looking for ways to overcome a projected $600,000 budget deficit expected in 2009. If the shortfall isn’t controlled, layoffs could result, officials have said.

Council is mulling ideas on how to rein in insurance costs. Ward 1 Councilman Dave Campbell wondered if the stipend paid employees to forego city-provided insurance could be increased. Presently, workers who use a spouse’s insurance plan receive an extra $200 each month in their paycheck.

Campbell said he took plenty of heat after last week’s suggestion that the city ask workers to boost their insurance co-pay.

“I never got so many threats,” Campbell said. “Some (city) employees are ruthless, greedy and selfish.”

Any insurance-based remedy must be distributed among workers, said Councilman-at-Large Chris Castrilla. “We’re not the bad guys here,” he said.

In other business, Williams will ask CT Consultants — Conneaut’s engineering firm — to see if state Issue 2 money already secured to improve an alternate truck route could instead be applied to creating a new access road.

The city has won money from the Ohio Public Works Commission to widen and strengthen Brown Avenue, the route heavy trucks now use to reach industries on the west end of Maple Avenue. Brown became the alternate route when a new bridge eliminated truck access from Parrish Road.

Residents on Brown are unhappy with the truck traffic and ask if Maple could somehow be extended and hooked into Parrish for the big rigs. A Maple Avenue extension project would be “substantially more expensive” than the Brown improvements, Williams said.

Some councilmen said they understood CW Ohio might we willing to donate some its land to a road extension project.

An early proposal floated at the start of the bridge project envisioned a one-way access road off Parrish Road that trucks would use to reach Maple and use Brown as an exit.

Elsewhere, council:

• Learned construction on the East Conneaut Industrial Park infrastructure project could commence by mid-2009. The city has lined up more than $1 million in cash, loans and grants to improve water and sewer service to the park, plus cut a new road through the property and install street lights.