Larimer County, Colorado couple among first to file for new “beneficiary agreement”

When Arne Andersen and his partner of 24 years, Ron Montoya, went to the Larimer County Courthouse last summer to file a designated beneficiary agreement, it provided an extra sense of security and recognition of their same-sex relationship they had never had before.

“We have some legal protection we didn’t have otherwise,” said Andersen, board president of the Fort Collins Lambda Community Center, a gay rights advocacy and education group.

If either Andersen or Montoya ends up in the hospital, the agreement gives them the legal right to visit each other there and make medical decisions for each other.

“We can prove we have the right to be there,” Andersen said.

In a show of support for same-sex marriage and to educate the gay community about designated beneficiary agreements, the Lambda Center last Saturday held a rally in downtown Fort Collins and marched to Avogadro’s Number to cut a symbolic wedding cake. During the event, the group set up a booth encouraging people to educate themselves about the rights designated beneficiary agreements provide.

Focus on the Family, which opposed the law creating designated beneficiaries agreements because the group viewed it as an incremental step toward same-sex marriage, declined to comment Thursday.

While same-sex marriage may be a long way off for gay couples in Colorado, designated beneficiary agreements provide a handful of legal rights that are small steps toward equality, Lambda Center executive director Andy Stoll said.

“It deals with death-and-dying stuff,” he said.

A designated beneficiary agreement grants two people, regardless of gender, the right to jointly own and transfer property, to take out an insurance policy together, to be recognized as beneficiaries under a retirement plan, to petition to be a guardian or personal representative of each other, to visit each other in the hospital, to make medical decisions for each other, to inherit property and a handful of other probate-related rights.

The bill creating such agreements was signed into law by Gov. Bill Ritter last year and took effect July 1, 2009.

By the end of January, 26 couples had filed designated beneficiary agreements in Larimer County, according to data from the county clerk’s office.

Some Front Range counties only have seen a handful of the agreements filed, while Denver had about 197 filed by the end of January. Only seven agreements had been filed in Weld County by that date, while 21 were filed in Adams County, 46 in Boulder County, 61 in Jefferson County and 40 in Arapahoe County, according to each county clerk’s office.

Stoll said he believes designated beneficiary agreements and their benefits remain largely unknown.

“Most of the people we’ve seen have been most of those folks in their 40s and 50s, where power of attorney and wills were kind of on their minds,” Stoll said. “Younger couples, we haven’t seen it happen yet.

“People just don’t know they exist yet,” he said.