PONTIAC, Mich. – Want to know how much respect and concern the teachers union has for the hard-working taxpayers of Michigan?
    
Absolutely none.
    
The union and its pet insurance company are owed millions of dollars by the Pontiac school district, and they want their money right now. They don’t care if local residents’ tax bills skyrocket in the process.
    
Here’s what happened. The very poor Pontiac district (which is struggling with a $26 million budget deficit) got behind in its employee health insurance premium payments to the Michigan Education Special Services Association (MESSA) in 2011 and 2012.
    
MESSA is an insurance company created and owned by the Michigan Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union.
    
When the school got more than a year behind in payments, MESSA went to court and won a judgment for $7.8 million, according to the Oakland Press. Since the school district doesn’t have that type of money lying around, the debt will be spread to property owners in the district, who may see their tax bills double this summer as a result.
    
An average Pontiac resident with a home assessed at $60,000 would have to pay an additional $360 to $420 in property taxes this year, according to the news report. That’s a lot of loot for average people trying to pay the bills and maintain their households.
    
The first temptation is to blame school officials for missing payments on employee insurance premiums, and some guilt undoubtedly lies there. But MESSA and the MEA shoulder a big share of the blame for a financial mess that’s exploding in the faces of the people who fund the school district.
    
The first problem is MESSA itself, and how it goes about its business.
    
For years local MEA unions have gone to the collective bargaining table demanding that local school boards purchase employee health insurance through MESSA, despite the fact that the union-owned insurance company has some of the most expensive rates in the state.
    
In many cases the union will have MESSA identified in union contracts as the designated insurance carrier for the district, preventing school officials from seeking bids from other companies with lower rates.
    
So schools are stuck with insurance policies they can’t afford, and sometimes they fall behind in payments.
    
The second problem is MESSA’s insistence that the Pontiac school district pay back the entire $7.8 million all at once. District officials reportedly tried to spread the new tax assessment over several years to lighten the immediate burden on residents, but MESSA wouldn’t hear of it.
    
“The district made the proposal but the opposing party wanted it all at once,” school district attorney Tim Gardner was quoted as saying.
    
For the record, MESSA has millions of dollars in reserve and is no danger of financial default. It could easily have agreed to spread the tax bill out to help residents avoid a sudden cash crisis.
    
Many property owners in the Pontiac school district will struggle to make the payments, and that could result in many home foreclosures, according to officials.
    
“This is a lot of tax to heap on a poor community,” school district Finance Director John Naglick was quoted as saying. “All it will accomplish is to drive up our delinquency rate and heap more work on the county treasurer’s office (to start foreclosure proceedings).”
    
So the teachers union and its insurance company may be directly responsible for throwing honest, hard-working people out of their homes. Don’t tell us that unions exist for the benefit of working people. This case proves what a lie that is.