CITY EMPLOYEE’S CONTRACTUAL RIGHT TO MEDICAL BENEFITS VESTED BEFORE THE COLLECTIVE BARGAINING AGREEMENT WAS TERMINATED (FOURTH DEPT).

The Fourth Department determined that plaintiff city employee’s medical benefits vested before the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) was terminated:

“As a general rule, contractual rights and obligations do not survive beyond the termination of a collective bargaining agreement . . . However, [r]ights which accrued or vested under the agreement will, as a general rule, survive termination of the agreement’ . . . , and we must look to well established principles of contract interpretation to determine whether the parties intended that the contract give rise to a vested right. [A] written agreement that is complete, clear and unambiguous on its face must be enforced according to the plain meaning of its terms’ ”  … . …

… [W]e conclude that the court properly determined that the plain meaning of the provisions at issue in the … CBA establishes that plaintiff has a vested right to medical benefits, those rights vested when he completed his 20th year of service, and plaintiff became eligible to receive said benefits when he reached retirement age… . Plaintiff’s right to medical benefits vested when he satisfied the criteria in the … CBA, and there is no language in the … CBA indicating that employees would forfeit or surrender their vested rights if they transferred jobs or unions prior to reaching retirement age. We thus conclude that the court’s interpretation of the … CBA ” give[s] fair meaning to all of the language employed by the parties to reach a practical interpretation of the expressions of the parties so that their reasonable expectations will be realized . . . [and does] not . . . leave one of its provisions substantially without force or effect’ ” … . Timkey v City of Lockport, 2018 NY Slip Op 08792, Fourth Dept 12-21-18