Should domestic partners be required to live together?

June 20--If two people are domestic partners, should they live together?

As Broward celebrates passage of its Human Rights Act this month, county commissioners are poised to consider changes to domestic partner laws that could impact who can register as a couple, and who cannot.

Long considered a leader in gay rights, Broward County is attempting to draw a balance between its progressive stance and the potential of domestic partnerships being used fraudulently.

Taxpayer funds are at stake.

The county is among Broward employers that extend health insurance benefits to domestic partners and their children. The county also recently agreed to spend $500,000 reimbursing employees for the income tax penalty associated with the benefit.

But to be a domestic partnership couple in Broward, you don't have to live together, share a bank account or show any other financial interdependence.

"I looked at other jurisdictions' proof of domestic partnership," Broward Commissioner Lois Wexler said as commissioners debated it earlier this month. "I see how very weak ours happens to be. We're not asking for any proof of anything."

County leaders are worried the rules are so loose, and the financial benefit so great, that it's ripe for fraud.

The county is considering requiring couples to prove they live together, a requirement in other counties, including Palm Beach, Monroe and Orange. Other counties ask to see that a couple shares a lease or mortgage, or carries the same address on driver licenses.

"You can have people that decide that their friend Jamie needs major surgery, so let's go down to the courthouse, Jamie and Joe, and become domestic partners ... and now you can apply for that benefit at the county," Wexler worried aloud at a meeting in October.

Currently, to become domestic partners, a couple plunks down $28 and swears under penalty of perjury that they're 18 or older, not blood relatives and are residents of Broward County. They also must swear that neither has had a different domestic partner in the past 30 days, and they agree to be "jointly responsible for each other's basic food and shelter during our domestic partnership."

Though the registry was approved in 1999 with a push from gay activists like now-Fort Lauderdale City Commissioner Dean Trantalis, the registry is popular with heterosexual couples.

For example, of the 114 couples that include a county employee, 82 are opposite sex, according to Broward Risk Management Director Kevin Kelleher.

In fact, Broward Commissioner Barbara Sharief is one of them, with partner Maxwell Chambers, a Miramar city commissioner.

When it was created in 1999, 486 couples signed up. The numbers have remained relatively steady since, with a peak of 632 couples in 2013. All told, 7,703 couples have registered since 1999, and 1,221 have terminated a registration.

Even as the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule on whether the Constitution requires states to allow same-sex marriage, and if not, whether they still must honor same-sex marriages from states that do allow them, activists here are asking Broward County to continue offering domestic partnership registry for those couples -- gay or straight -- who don't want to marry.

When the residency and other changes, including reciprocity with other counties' registries, were debated at a June County Commission meeting, Stratton Pollitzer, deputy director of Equality Florida, a rights group for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, urged commissioners to reaffirm the role of domestic partnership registries.

"I think it is one of the most important legacies of the LGBT rights movement that we have developed domestic partnership rights that came 25 years ago as a way to provide some basic protections to same sex couples," he said, "but that is now seen to provide both same sex and opposite sex couples with these basic protections."

Gay activists and members of the county's Human Rights Board oppose a residency requirement, saying straight couples don't have to live together to marry. They also said there is no evidence of fraud.

"When it comes to domestic partnership," Trantalis said, "there's an assumption there's a propensity for deceit and misrepresentation that I find offensive."

County Auditor Evan Lukic said investigating such fraud would be intrusive and "unseemly," and that's why "you don't find much data about it."

"Hopefully the county auditor is not being instructed to go visit people's homes and check in the middle of the night to see who is staying where," he said.

The Human Rights Act, originally passed on June 21, 1978, protects against discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodation. Though it protects people from discrimination based on race, color, sex, religion, national origin, disability, age, pregnancy and marital status, those protections are not confined just to the county law.

However, the county's act goes further to protect Broward residents from discrimination based on political affiliation, sexual orientation, gender expression or identity and age under 40.

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