All
right. Good morning, everybody. We have a work session this morning on workers comp for Garfield County. We'll start off with roll call. Commissioner Jacobson. Present.
here. Commissioner Marks out on a health leave. All right. Let's start with
One nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all.
If you'd have a moment of silence in your own way,
okay, thank you.
Thank you very much.
We have just one item on the work session.
And that is workers' comp for Garfield County.
And I'll turn it over to County Manager for Johnson for introductions and to get our work session started.
Sure. Thank you.
Good morning, commissioners.
As you said, we've got a work session this morning,
exclusively on Workman's comp insurance for the county.
And just to go back in time, back in January of this year,
the board set out its policy objectives.
And one of those policy objectives was to evaluate Workman's
workers comp as well as property liability cap for the county.
So we took that charge seriously with Heather Beatty,
myself, Jamaica Watts, Scott Hendrickson, and Jessica Roberts formed a team to evaluate
this on your behalf, and so we've taken the bulk of this year to work through that.
We realized most of the way through the year that because of the work that it took,
workmen's comp seemed to be really what we needed to push forward with right now and separate
property liability out.
And so we went out to bid to bring on a broker, which is glimmered insurance.
That was, they were successful in that effort and so they are, had they have been working
with us and have brought in in terms of a quote, pinnacle to work alongside them to present
to you this morning.
CETSI has been also a partner in this effort.
They hopefully are on Zoom, I'm not on Zoom just yet, but they are also going to present
commissioners after this group presents, so it's going to be a two part presentation.
So that way you can ask questions as you want, evaluate it as you'd like, it's a work session, so no decisions are made today.
But know that your staffs work really hard, Heather in her office in particular have done a great deep dive in a lot of these things.
And it's very familiar with how this works as well as Jessica Roberts, our HR director is not quite here yet.
So we're excited to have them present to you and work through your questions and see what's best for Garfield County.
No decision is made today, but why don't you go through the decision-making process?
Yeah, absolutely.
So given the timing of this issue, if the board, well, let me say it this way, today no decisions are made.
And then when you take up your next business meeting, which is the second of December?
It's Monday.
It's Monday, yeah.
But I don't know if you want to kick it out until December.
Right.
You won't be able to make a decision until you get to your next regular.
It's not an agenda right now, but you've got three meetings in December.
The idea is the soonest you can, the better, if you decide to make a change so
that there's ramp up so that when January 1 hits, you are insured and we all know what we're doing.
And that gives this team enough time to help us get there, should you want to go there.
That's the idea.
So that's the process.
Yes, thank you.
That's helpful.
that help both commissioners it's kind of what it is all right hey with that was let's have
introductions and then we'll let you start with your presentation yes so I'm Nettie Avery
Glenwood Insurance I am the producer on the account kind of the project manager and I'm here
today with some of my team we are supported by more and I'll go through that but I have been a
Glenwood Insurance for 35 years I specialize in large commercial and we have clients in the public
entities sector. So we are familiar with how diverse the public entity is.
Tom Jensen. I'm the lost control advisor with Glenwood insurance. I've been with Glenwood
for about two and a half years. Before I heard of that, I was in a similar role with
the pinnacle assurance. In my role, I really am the point of contact for all safety,
lost control, data, looking at ways to optimize the plan and help keep workers safe.
Mindy shoe. I am the account executive on NETI Avery's team. I have two NETIs, did you say
that correct? No, Mindy. Mindy. Mindy, okay. All right. Thank you. All right. All right.
And so we let Pinnacle introduce themselves as they go as they present or do want that now. Let's
do that. Let's do that. Introduce yourselves as you come forward and present. Okay. Okay. That's
Great.
So little, I know we only have 45 minutes, so I'm going to be respectful of time.
What I'm going to do is give you kind of a high level view of what we're recommending,
the total program that we're recommending to the county commissioners.
And then Tom will then take over and give some information about how we came to our recommendation
and do a little bit deeper dive.
Then we'll pass it to Pinnacle and let them tell you about Pinnacle's company and their offerings
for safety and different things that they offer, then Tom and I will come back up and just
kind of tell you the supplemental things that Glenwood Insurance can promise to give you.
So we're going to tag team it, we're going to be here locally, Pinnacle has their safety
and loss prevention that they can help you with, but we're here local and what can we do for
you there, and what does the transition look like?
So Glenwood Insurance has been in business in the valley for over 100 years.
We ensure many people in the valley, many of our staff, our members of our community,
and our whole program is really looking at a partner situation for years to come.
Not just this year, we want to take it years to come and you can see some more realized
savings as we go along partnering together for loss prevention and different safety issues.
So again, we just introduced ourselves.
I'm the project manager.
Mindy, she was here.
She's our executive.
Both of us have specialty and large commercial.
Mindy supports me.
We also have Ricky Daniel out of our rifle office.
So we have offices in Glenwood, Rifle, and Denver.
So we're not just local.
Our expands, reaches all of Colorado.
But we really are trying to solve some of your problems.
Maybe it's lowering premium ways that we can lower premium for you in years to come,
not only this year, but years to come.
Safety in the workplace, just keeping our fellow community members safe.
And if they do get injured, how do we get them back to health?
How do we get them back to work?
The other person that's not here is Parm, Kirwell, she is our claims liaison.
on. So she works to help close claims support she can work between the pinnacle and the policyholder,
Garfield County, or she can work between pinnacle and the injured worker. She helps just kind of close
claims get things moving, keep things moving. So as we went out to market, we did approach several
companies. We had several considerations, but we laser down to one. Yes, we want them to be financially
We want them to have expertise in public entities, so we don't want to just work with anyone, and we really wanted somebody that can help us with claims management, closing claims, safety, loss prevention.
There are other services that come along with Pinnacle, and I'll let them get into more of what their services entail, but some of the things are like multilingual and translation services.
online services to help your staff quickly report claims, look at billing, all of that.
So, and the other thing I'd like to point out, and pinnacle can speak to, is there's an injured worker survey score, and
pinnacle ranks like number one in that for injured workers.
They survey all of the companies and kind of compare companies and see how they do.
Pinnacle has a very strong score on that.
So our recommendation is pinnacle assurance with a $2,000 deductible.
If you look at our quoted premium, there's very similar to what you see from CTSI.
So we're suggesting that you put in place a per claim deductible.
Tom is going to tell us why and how that helps in a few minutes.
We,
in your September meeting, I think, with CTSI, you had asked what the pool experienced
modest, and they responded that they were a .96.
As you exit the pool and enter the marketplace, Garfield County will have their own individual
experience modification factor, and that is set by National Council of Compensation Insurance.
So, NCCI is a national council that sets your workers, are your experience not.
They look at the past three years, full three years, and they sort of, in summary, they
say, are you better than your claims better than expected, or are they worse?
And as you can see, with a 0.8 credit, you're better.
You're doing better than your peers, you're doing better than the pool itself.
So we feel like that's, we've modeled that.
We don't have the firm NCCI rating yet,
but Glenwood Insurance has modeled it,
and Penical has modeled it,
and we feel pretty firm that that,
pretty confident that that will be a point eight eight.
Other things that you can do,
I'm just showing you future pricing considerations.
So this may be one of your worst years with this 4.78,
because we're gonna put tools in place,
In this case, levers in place that you can hopefully continue to sustain lower premiums by implementing safety, a deductible, and cost containment certification.
If you are cost containment certified in Colorado, and Tom will get more into depth on that, it's 5% credit.
So you get next year, we're anticipating in 2026, you would be eligible for that certification and would receive.
That's basically a report, right, that we do.
I remember doing that for Sunlight mountains, or something.
Yes.
Tom, do you want to speak to that?
You know, quick.
Sure, I can speak to that.
So the cost containment program run by the State Department of Labor, it defines what
a lost control and employee safety program, kind of minimum requirements, what it should
look like.
And they have six specific categories that you need to have in place.
There's an overarching safety policy statement.
they look at your employee orientation process, safety training, claims management, and your return
to work programs. Those are the core pieces of it. And if the state determines that, those programs
meet the minimum threshold, and I'll say a fair part of it is administrative, so they're looking
for specific types of documentation and signatures. If that's in place or once that's in place,
you can apply for the certification. There's a board that reviews those applications and issues
the certifications and then once you have that just maintaining those programs and providing
a lost run to the state at each renewal to keep that going provides you that 5% discount
and we're we're huge proponents of both Glenwood and Pinnacle of being a part of the cost
containment certification program and I'm a member of the cost containment board as well.
Great. Did you work with Keith Rice? I did not work with Keith Rice. I took Keith Rice's position
and he moved on to the county and I was in that position
to get the ideas.
We're in the process of hiring a new,
it's not a risk manager, we're hiring a safety
and loss prevention specialist
as the most we do.
Right.
Give it our transition.
Right, we saw that.
Okay, and then other pricing considerations
that I want you to think about down the road
are the dividends, right?
So, pinnacle and they'll go into more depth,
this is high level, but they offer general dividends.
So pinnacle operates similarly to a mutual
insurance company and if they determine that they have a surplus for the year, they return
that surplus to their policyholders. It's no cost to enroll. You are eligible if you
are a policyholder. So if you were to choose to go to pinnacle in 2025, you would be eligible
without any sort of enrollment. That dividend is usually declared and maybe paid 18 to 24
months after. If you're still whether or not you're with pinnacle at all, you still are eligible
eligible for that dividend because you were insured by Pinnacle for that year.
So that is the entire Pinnacle portfolio.
Yes.
They look at what the claims were and make that decision.
Yes.
Exactly.
So that's no cost you.
I kind of equate it to maybe the equity distribution that you're seeing from CTSI in
that you earned that equity distribution when you were insured with CTSI, right?
That's yours.
So you earned it that you deserve that, and that's similar to what this general dividend would be for you in future years.
With workers come by always kind of take it, it's not truly insurance, because we're paying for our losses, but it is insurance if we have one that goes.
Hey, why?
Crazy, that's exactly.
Million dollars or something.
Right.
We've got another, I want to just mention the individual loss control dividend.
And that's another optional dividend program offered to larger policy holders.
It is a cost.
There's a cost of 5% premium to enroll yourself into that dividend program.
And if you bet on yourself, you're standing on your own merits.
You can earn up to 18.8% return dividend, additional dividend besides the general dividend.
So that's a price consideration.
18.8 is a zero loss ratio.
So if you have no claims, you could get 18.8.
I'll let them speak to that.
There's a matrix in your packet that shows you, based on your premium and a potential loss
ratio, what you could earn back.
So, you've got that. I know your stewards of the campus.
And so on the $2,000 deductible, I'm familiar with that from that, even if we have incidents that we still submit those to pinnacle and pinnacle still records those.
Yes.
And so somehow they're tied into the equation, but I mean, that's a great segue into what Tom is going to deep dive into.
Maybe he can answer some more questions.
Okay.
So looking at the deductible program and why a deductible makes sense in a work comp policy in Colorado,
and we want to look at the benefits of that deductible.
The first benefit comes at the time of underwriting the policy, having a deductible results in a credit upfront.
The carrier understands that you're taking on a portion of the risk yourself, and so they issue a credit for that, the larger the deductible, that larger that initial credit.
So that's the first place that the deductible is directly involved.
The second piece goes into how your e-mod is calculated moving forward.
So in Colorado, we are what's called a net reporting state.
The money that gets reported, the costs and claims that get reported to NCCI are only
those that are borne by the carrier.
Any costs that are paid through a deductible are backed out of the report that goes to NCCI.
So if you have a $2,000 deductible and an employee goes to an urgent care clinic and they get
checked out because they're concerned that they injured themselves and it's one visit and
that's done and it's $500.
That would be filed like a normal claim, pinnacle will manage it.
At the end of the day when that key claim closes and the total amount is assessed, that $500 would be invoiced back to the county.
At that point, that claim, because it's under your deductible, will not go into the report that goes to NCCI.
So it's like it didn't happen from the rating perspective.
So, Fred, did your team talk about that, how that would be handled by county staff, by finance, by-
Yes, the way we have it set up right now, Jessica Roberts, our HR director, will be the one who manages that with-
If we end up working with climate insurance and Pinnacle, we'll still do that.
And you're going to learn later, Tom, about the services that they are bringing to the table to help Jessica do that claim management.
So, the short answer is yes.
Okay, so that's the first piece.
It reduces the overall costs and potentially number of claims that are reported to NCCI,
which then begins affecting your e-mod down the road.
In future years, you'll look better to the rating agency.
The second piece of that deductible is that the way the e-mod is calculated, and this is
why it actually has more of an impact than you might think.
The way an email is calculated, the first $18,500 of a claim are given a far higher weight
in the rating process than everything above $18,500.
The reason is that statistically small claims are typically small claims indicate that there's
a frequency problem and a risk problem and that there's a potential for something to blow
up.
So, they look at those small claims as more of an indicator of why you are a certain level
of risk.
The second thing is the claims that get very large aren't necessarily tied to the cause
of this variety of the claim.
And you can look at something as simple as someone can cut their finger and needs four
sutures.
That one individual cuts their finger, they need four sutures, they go to urgent care, they
get stitches ten days later, they get them out, the end of the day it's $800 done.
one. That same person could cut a one-eighth inch deeper and
last rate attendant. What's the difference? Almost no difference in the
mechanism of injury, but now it's a surgical repair and it's $40,000. That same
injury could result in a surgical repair and an infection and IV antibiotics and
time in the hospital and all the sudden it's 150,000. The insurance industry sees
that those great big claims are somewhat anomalies is that they really focus on the small
claims as the big indicator of what your risk is.
So by you reducing the first dollars under 18,500, you're having a big impact on your overall
picture.
You say, well, why wouldn't we cover a much larger portion under the deductible?
And there's a diminishing return as you go up in amount because of the way that calculation
happens.
So if we pay the first, you know, say we pay 10 claims that are under $2,000, those are
noted by a pinnacle but they're not part of our calculation for experience mod.
That's correct.
Any claim under your deductible is not reported at all.
any claim over your deductible is reduced by the deductible that you paid.
So if you have a $10,000 claim, $8,000 is reported to NCCI.
Okay, and actually my next slide does step into that a little bit more deeply
about how we arrived at 2000 as a recommendation.
So overall the deductible really can do three things.
It can lower your premium up front.
It can lower your experience modification factor down the road
and therefore reduce your overall program cost.
As we go into our analysis,
we looked at the years 2021, 2022, and 2023.
Those are the years that are being used
to determine your first mod,
which we estimate will be at the point eight.
I'd like to show you how a deductible would affect you
in the future, but there are too many variables
in the future to really, I think,
have a good honest conversation about that,
because many things are not in our control.
What we can do, I think, is to go back and say,
what if you had been in a program with a given deductible
for those three years?
So you made this change three years ago.
Where would you be today?
Looking at your actual losses and your actual payroll,
we estimate that if you had a $2,000 deductible in place
for those three years, your e-mail would be a .74 right now.
which could result in approximately a $74,000 reduction in your premium over the last 10 years.
Now, we need to add back in deductibles to look at what the total benefit would have been.
So, over the last 10 years, because I wanted to take a long view of what your average cost would be,
because you have good years and you have bad years, but your average cost out of pocket over those 10 years
would have been about $32,000. So, that would have been the contribution toward deductibles.
But that would leave you up $40,000, $42,000 less this year than your lap right now, right?
That's always a could of what a should of but we want to kind of show what that road map can look like.
If you went to a $5,000 deductible for those three years, you'd see an increased savings but you'd also see more deductible paid in.
And what we start to see is a diminishing return as the deductible goes up.
And did you run those numbers off of our history off from your history?
Yes, so that's a model of where you would be $2,000 is a better deal.
Right, yeah, it's that kind of that range of claims that you have, and so it's very,
and this is something, you know, if we move forward working together, we,
and Pinnacle, will work on a deductible analysis each year because it might
change over time as your safety program, your claims performance improve, or you
have a bad year, and also just medical costs in the medical environment. But it's not a fixed
number. It can be changed each year. It's a really optimized to your unique situation.
Great. Yeah. Good point. So, any questions on that?
No, go ahead. Okay, forward. Mr.
Shamson, you have questions. All right.
My name is Sarah Benzman. I'm a senior business director
Under pinnacle assurance, I have been with pinnacle for 22 years.
Colorado native, on behalf of the pinnacle team to thank you for allowing us to be here today, we're really excited to present this proposal in partnership with Glenwood Insurance.
I would just like to tell you a little bit about pinnacle and then I'm going to allow some of our team members to share some additional information as it pertains to some safety services that we have claims and so on.
So similar to Glenwood, pinnacle has been serving the state of Colorado for over 100 years.
We were created in 1915.
Our mission is to protect Colorado businesses and their greatest assets, which are their employees.
So this is the one thing that we do, workers comp and Colorado, and we are the experts at doing it.
We care so much about our Colorado communities.
We have a robust pinnacle foundation that we have created that supports children whose parents have been in workplace accidents or if they've had an unfortunate parent that passes away on the job regardless of whether or not they are pinnacle customers.
So we have created that foundation and really try to support the children of injured workers in the state of Colorado through that.
we also have a robust pinnacle and action program where we support our community across
the state of Colorado because that is so important to us. We are the leading work comp
insurer in the state and we're up for just a second. Sure. So pinnacle is is a quasi-private
public business correct? Correct. We are quasi-governmental. Right. And the change is really
that happened to pinnacle about 20 years ago.
About somewhat of a scandal.
I don't know if it was a scandal,
but it was in the news about how much
exactly is you're being paid or something to that,
if I remember right.
So but you are a quasi-governmental public entity.
Right, so as Netty shared,
we operate as a domestic mutual insurance company.
So, any surplus we have goes back to our policy holders.
We still have our Board of Directors selected by the governor, and then we are, while also
being a competitive carrier, ensuring approximately 50% of the Colorado employers in the state,
we are also the assured source of insurance, so that if there is an employer that can't
find coverage elsewhere, we take them.
Okay.
And we're happy about that.
My background is ski industry, so.
Excellent.
I worked with the ski industry for quite some years, which is up here visiting with sunlight a year or two ago.
So, very good.
So we offer comprehensive coverage and exceptional service to our employers.
Pinnacle operates slightly uniquely to other insurance companies.
A lot of times you have an underwriting department, a claims department, a safety department.
While we have all of that, we really focus on business teams that surround the customer so that we can provide a multi-disciplinary approach to how we're serving you.
That's how I have a team of individuals here in partnership with Glenwood that focus only on public entity customers.
We work with cities, towns, municipalities, fire districts and so on, and that is this team's sole focus.
We have other teams that focus on more diversified business or health care business.
So, this is where we really want to provide that expertise with what you do with our team here.
As I mentioned, our mission is to protect Colorado businesses.
We do that through providing competitive pricing, which button is that?
This is just the right arrow.
Okay, thank you.
Competitive pricing, best-in-class claim service,
this, which Chris is going to talk to you a little bit more about when he comes up and
then proactive safety support.
We truly believe that we can be an incredible partner to Garfield in conjunction with Glenwood
insurance so that you have the most optimal outcomes, and that should you have any of your
employees injured, we're going to help get them better as quick as possible and back to work.
Yeah, and on my other comments, I'm also very aware of the excellence pinnacle is you know what you've done in the last 20 years to
Thank you so much for the
State of Colorado and companies that can't get workers confidence, especially our trades.
Thank you so much.
Maybe the ski industries.
Yes, so I am going to now hand it over to Sabrina who will be your underwriter if you choose to come with Glenwood and pinnacle.
My name is Sabrina Willis. I'm a senior underwriter on the public sector team for pinnacle assurance.
I bet a pinnacle for 19 and a half years now.
And I wanted to talk to you about the policy hold of portal.
Were you going to do the portal?
You know what?
I was going to do the portal.
My apologies, Sabrina.
So we have a robust online services.
The first is the policy hold of portal.
This, as Netty mentioned earlier, is going to allow you the opportunity to look at any
policy information that you have but also to look up any claim information that you might
have anything you might need to know around your policy and claims.
You're going to have access to 24-7 here, of course our team is available, but this
is going to give you robust information at your fingertips.
We also have an injured worker portal.
This is going to allow any of your employees that may unfortunately have a claim to be able
to log in and get similar information regarding their claim.
it's going to let them know basic claim information, it's going to help them keep track of any
indemnity benefit payments that they might be receiving, they can submit for mileage reimbursement
on the portal. Really, we want to make it easy for your employees.
To navigate their claim reach out to their claim representative, should they have any questions, they can also view medical records on the portal. So, really robust online services for you as an employer, also for any injured workers. And now I'm going to hand it over to Sabrina.
So, I wanted to thank you again. Safety Service, we have the largest safety service team in Colorado. It's composers of like three components.
We've got a team that handles, and they all work together very well.
A team that handles coming out and doing visits, training.
We have a team that handles innovation.
They're looking for new things, new building, new training.
We have a team that does new training.
And they are a very, they like to work with the customers.
or strictly they are local.
We have people out here on your side of the mountain
that will be out here helping.
We have a few people out here that will be out here helping.
We also have a return to work specialist
who you'll meet soon, that is also out here.
I'm not gonna go over every one of these safety services
because we've included it in your packet
for you to look at and review and have for future reference.
But they work in conjunction with the Glenwood agency, so we would be glad to get them out and help you.
We have a value of about $50,000 on our safety services that we offer.
So we also have some that are done in Spanish, some trainings that are done in Spanish.
If you need to address some of the Spanish speaking workers in your community, we can do that.
So, one thing, again, I just go back to my background, one thing that, and this is a long
time ago, because I haven't been involved in workers come for quite some time, but in
the skin industry, when there was a claim, there were like one or two, three people that
claim would go to it, because they were experts, or they knew what that industry was, and
So will that be the case with the county,
or will the claim just go to however it rotates up?
No, we will have designated claims wrap
and I think Chris Jen, what's it we'll speak to that
for just for Garfield County.
So our team specifically works with public entities
So we're with the fire, the police, streets and roads.
So all of our people have expertise.
We have a fabulous claims team that I'm very proud of our claims team.
We have a really good claims team.
They really care about the employees.
So it will be with one to person that will be helping you with your claims.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
Okay, so next I will introduce Chris Hansen.
Chris Hansen.
I have a clinical assurance for eight years.
I am the underwriting lead for our public entity team.
This slide is kind of a transition between Sabrina talking about safety and Mr. Janowicz
here in a minute is going to talk more about claims.
But Sabrina is talking about safety and the first point on here is the cheapest claim is
the one that never happens.
And that's really the focus of our safety team.
We're going to mitigate all the risks and then whatever residual risk yet, they're going
to be claims.
They're always be claims.
But we want to reduce that number of claims.
And overall, through the company, we're finding 40% of customers have seen a reduction
in frequency a year after visiting with our claims group.
Add Tom to the mix who's, again, a former pinnacle safety engineer.
and it's just going to be that much more effective.
PENICLE closes claims 25% faster and we're going to show you some public entity, a specific
terms in just a minute.
But in general, PENICLE closes claims 25% more quickly than our competitors.
and this is from a study done by Oliver Wyman who looked at all of the Colorado workers' compensation carriers and determined that Pinnacle was the most efficient.
What does that mean? If we get these things closed quicker, that gets your folks back to work quicker. That means there's fewer overtime by the folks having to fill in.
So there's all these extra claims pieces that are indirect costs of a claim that are not covered by insurance
They actually just will just come out of the Garfield County budget
So we want to get these guys back to it back to work quicker so that they can resume their work
And going into that does that mean
We're just gonna put these guys back to work and they're not fully fixed. No, we are and
And NETI mentioned earlier, our injured workers' satisfaction score is the highest in the state.
The folks that come to pinnacle with injuries because of the empathetic way our claims adjusters
work with them, pardon me, they come back feeling better than they would have otherwise.
So, the injured worker's satisfaction score is something we are so proud of and what happens if someone else is responsible for the claim, we will pursue them and you will get your deductible back, we will reduce your experience mod by that claim, so we are also looking towards that.
All right, I'd like to now introduce Chris for Janowicz.
Good
morning.
Thank you for having us.
My name is Chris Janowicz.
I'm the team lead for the claims operation of our public entity sector.
Been with Pinnacle coming on about eight years or so.
I'm responsible for overseeing our claims team, ensuring they are working to close claims as quickly and efficiently as possible while still providing the utmost level of service.
to both our injured workers and our policy holders.
Tom, I wanted to answer your question about the assignment piece.
We've identified a particular representative who would be handling all of the identity
cases for Garfield County.
Initially, most claims reported, are reported as quote-unquote medical only.
As Tom was mentioning, somebody cuts their finger, they seek treatment at an urgent care.
Treatment is minor.
There's no lost time.
There's no indemnity benefits, permanent benefits paid at that point.
Most of those claims will remain medical only.
They will remain with a medical only team that still does service and
specialize in the public sector.
Should those claims require additional investigation?
Should they be placed in a no work status?
The claim becomes lost time, evidence of permanency arises, legal representation.
Any number of these triggers arise, the claim will be moved over to our indemnity representative.
Furthermore, once claims reach the two-year mark or an excess of $350,000 gross incurred,
they move to our complex claims representative.
This is a team of the best and the brightest claims handlers within the industry.
So Chris was hitting on average days to recovery, our claim representatives closed claims quicker.
Our data suggests on the lower end of the spectrum, every day a claim remains open costs
about an extra $80, so we close claims approximately 41 days quicker than public entities across
the state of Colorado with other carriers, so you can do the math there.
How is this done?
And what are claims representatives doing on a day-to-day basis?
They're leveraging and collaborating with a plethora of internal resources that we have within our organization.
This includes what isn't limited to our nurse case managers, our inside legal council,
special investigations units, our suburbation team, as well as our medical operations department.
This is, this could, we could probably have a separate presentation just on our medical operations department.
They're overseeing all of the clinics within our select net directory to ensure all of the physicians who are seeing and
treating your employees are up to date with their licensing and credentialing.
Reporting to the state, they're ensuring that they're providing the information from their appointments directly to not just pinnacle but
our field county in a timely and efficient manner.
So not only is pinnacle well aware of the status
of your employees and their recovery,
but Garfield County is just as aware
of where their injured workers sit
in terms of the recovery.
So how does this work with our disability insurance?
Is there any integration there,
if somebody's injured on the job,
disability insurance doesn't play a part?
So typically, when we have that question or, you know, FMLA, when that comes up, we usually
try to keep them separate.
When an injured worker, you know, has exceeded three mischiefs, they become eligible for temporary
total disability or temporary partial disability benefits where they're going to be paid
by pinnacle at two-thirds of their gross average weekly wage, any decisions made by an employer
to utilize supplemental insurance, disability, FMLA, or even utilizing sick vacation time from
their own, from the employee's personal bank would be what we would consider business decisions
made by an employer. And we've seen a wide array of creativity that employers use.
Employees, they hear, I'm only getting two thirds of my pay, I can't pay my bills. This is somebody's
livelihood. This is putting food on the table. So there's options out there, you know,
for utilizing that sick vacation time to get those back to the employer.
Correct. Correct. But they're, but they're guaranteed, you know, should they have a
compensable injury? They're guaranteed two thirds of their gross pay, tax exempt, supposed
the mileage reimbursement. It does, it does end up making them closer to whole than they
initially think when they hear two thirds.
And then Chris also touched on our injured worker
satisfaction scores being higher than our competitors and not just our injured worker
satisfaction, our policyholder satisfaction as well throughout the claims process.
I would say that one of the key things our claim representatives pride themselves on
is our constant communication with all parties involved, our employers, our injured workers,
are providers, especially at high key touch points during the life of a claim,
somebody's taken off for surgery, somebody's just taken off work,
taken off work by the doctor, they don't know what to do, they're given an impairment rating,
and they've just seen a doctor who's measured how far their shoulder can move behind their back,
and they're assigning a number to them, and they have no idea what's happening.
So we really pride ourselves on our constant communication with all involved parties
we understand that these are life altering events.
Most employees haven't experienced anything like this.
And we want to make sure that we are holding their hands through the process.
They understand every step of the way.
They understand the paperwork that's being issued to them on a weekly basis.
We also understand too, one of Garfield County's asks would be regular claim reviews.
Either quarterly semi-annually annual basis.
While we do see this occasionally among our team of public entities, we have found it to not necessarily be necessary, given the constant level of communication and ensuring our employers are fully up to speed with where their employees sit in their claim and what their next steps are for the recovery.
Yeah, I think that disconnect might be just between our management and in this board because we aren't we aren't operational for say it's kind of commissioner's policy level.
Yeah, and decision made policy policy.
What the 4.2% is that out of five?
Yes.
And
next up, we have Jordan Cagney.
Good morning, you guys.
My name is Jordan, and I'm the Return to Work Consultant for the Public Enidys team.
I've been with Pinnacle for 11 years.
And one special element of the Return to Work team at Pinnacle is we all have backgrounds in vocational rehabilitation.
So assisting individuals with limitations into remaining and staying in the workforce.
So we're all uniquely qualified to kind of get creative with you, to keep your injured employees working and engaged during the course of their recovery.
we know that getting people back to work, we have a lot of data that supports that it is really critical to the overall claims outcomes, and we know that it's really important for you guys to manage your financial outcomes as well to keep those indemnity costs low.
And so I'm a specialized resource that just does that that helps you guys come up with creative solutions to get and keep people at work during the course of their recovery.
So I can provide services that range from helping you brainstorm, modify duty tasks and options for that person within their
restrictions to make sure they are able to safely stay at work. I can help with facilitating formal written offers of
modify duty. These situations can be complex as much as we love to just say, hey, come back to work and the people comply.
That doesn't always happen. So sometimes we need a little bit more leverage or documents.
presentation or clarity around the situation. And I can help with creating offers that are legally binding in compliance with the work on statute. We have a robust nonprofit program. So when we really are out of ideas and maybe there isn't a good fit within within the workplace that makes sense for you guys and for the injured worker, we can partner with local nonprofits to facilitate volunteer arrangements and lieu of modified duty at the business. And we also have a number of other alternative solutions
like virtual training that we can facilitate, so truly believe anybody can get back to work if
they've been released with restrictions and I'm here to partner with you guys to come up with
those creative solutions and work hand in hand with you guys. I work really closely with our
team claims team and so we're here to make sure that we can help you achieve your goals and
managing those claims costs and making sure that your workers are cared for and that you can keep
your workers close and engage and feeling valued. It really does make a difference in the whole
outcome of their claim. You know, people who don't go back to work or offer certain periods
of time have less likelihood of returning to the workforce at all. We don't like that. We want
people to stay in the workforce, to stay in the community. And so, yeah, we're showing advocates
of this. And I would work closely with you and your team to make sure that we can get people back
to work in a safe and healthy manner that makes sense for you guys.
And so how do you interact with the individualist handling the claim?
So the claim comes, you know, how do you interact with that?
Yeah, so depending on the situation, obviously, if your interworker just never misses time,
probably you're not going to use me.
But if there's any sort of complexity with the situation, maybe the restrictions are hard
to understand.
Maybe we don't know what we can have this person do.
Maybe the interworker isn't compliant.
The claims team tags me in.
We work closely together. We're always communicating so they tag me in. I would reach out to our point of contact with your team
Whoever that is and we would talk talk through the solutions figure out what that needs to happen
My goal is to make it easy for you guys to you know to take a lot of the heavy lift
Obviously you guys have to do the boots on the ground with getting that person back to work
But I'm here to help with everything else to make it easy for you and again staying in that constant contact contact with the claims team
and just working seamlessly with you guys
and doing really whatever you need.
I'm here and available.
How many individuals in your department?
We have nine.
You would just get the pleasure working with me,
though, I'd be directly assigned to your role today,
so if you're already looking elsewhere,
I'm really sorry, you know what I mean?
We're stuck with you.
You would be stuck, yes, I know.
It's really terrible, but I promise to do my best.
Any other questions?
I'm going to hand it back to Tom at this point.
Thanks, Sarah.
Really appreciate that.
I do have one question back for you, Sarah.
So how many counties do you have right now in Pinnacle?
Do you have it?
An idea on that?
A lot.
A lot of counties.
So it's so.
I don't have a number off the top of my head, but we ensure quite a few.
Okay, thank you.
Do you ensure anyone riding this north of Australia who is that?
We, I think there's a testimonial page in-
60?
Page 60.
But it's, is it City of Aspen, Town of Snowmass?
Yeah.
Ego County.
Former City Aspen, Douglas County, and Snowmass Village.
We also have Pitkin County, so fairly close.
So we have resources.
If you want to reach out to anybody at those counties, they can give you some names.
You stole my question.
And specifically counties that have left the pool that you're in right now.
So they've gone through this exact transition over the last several years.
Right.
So what I want to do is just cover what Glenwood Insurance can do in conjunction with
Pinnacle.
We really have quite a bit of overlap in the services that we're going to provide, starting
with the claims process.
So, as Nettie mentioned, we have a claims liaison on staff.
Her sole job is to monitor claims, assist policy holders with filing when they need it,
and then kind of looking over the shoulders of everyone.
She's looking over the shoulder, the policy holder and pinnacle and just trying to stay engaged
and identify our things working the way that we expect them to is pinnacle, you know, moving
claims along the way that we expect them to is there a friction with pinnacle, with the
county, with the injured workers that maybe she sees that they don't, sometimes being a
little bit further back gives you a different view. So she'll be doing along with me monthly
reviews of your claims or we'll run a report and just see what's going on. Maybe there's
action that we can suggest to make an improvement. Maybe it's nothing. Maybe things are going
along great and we'll just leave it at that. But we'll do those monthly reviews, just kind
of looking at where we are. Then quarterly, as you mentioned, we'll be doing a full deep
dive into your claims trends to understand, hey, is there an exposure that isn't being
well handled, is there something going on with the return to work process, maybe that
we can help move forward, so quarterly we're going to take a deeper look to understand
what's unfolding in front of us as the policy or goals on, and then we'll provide feedback
directly to the county, saying, hey, we see this, whether it's, man, everything's going great,
spread the kudos around to your team, or, man, here's the thing we're seeing, maybe something
in the roads and bridge department where maybe there's been a change in leadership or a change
you know, excess workload and maybe we can help identify those risks.
So we'll be looking at that.
Pinnacle has something that I think is relatively unique.
They have the ability to generate loss reports that benchmark against similar entities.
So we can kind of say, what does this mean?
We see where you are, but what, that's just a snapshot.
And I think it's important that we compare you to yourself over time, but it's also valuable
to look at where you why compared to similar public entities.
And so, pinnacle has the ability to drill that down and generate that report.
So, we can use that as kind of a check throughout the year to say, how are we doing?
And then the last one is a really deep, dive annual claims trend where we will present
to the board where we are and what we see moving forward.
Yes.
Lost control.
So, I'm here local.
I will admit, I live in gypsum, I don't live in the county, but I'm here local, I'm here
just about every day.
So I'm really going to be the first, the first point of contact for loss control and safety.
I can act as a gatekeeper and a facilitator with Pinnacle's team and I think we have a unique
stimulation where I have worked very closely with Pinnacle's team over the years.
So I communicate with them almost daily on all of our policy holders.
But main things I want to focus on, right off the bat, cost containment certification.
There's a ticking clock on that.
We want to make sure that if you move forward, you have it for 2026 at the latest.
So, we'll look at all your programs and see where you stand, and I will help you fill
in the gaps.
Being a member of the board, I'm very familiar with the process.
I can't guarantee certification, that's not appropriate, but I will say that we understand
the process between us and pinnacle better than anyone out there.
Then beyond that, I really want to focus on boots on the ground safety.
That is really where most of the difference is made.
You have, I've reviewed, some very robust,
written, documented safety programs.
I think he did you proud with the documentation
that he put together.
The next step is making sure that that's really happening
out at the job site.
So I'm very focused on getting into your program,
getting out there meeting supervisors,
meeting people, doing work, understanding how they do work,
how they interact with the hazards around them,
and help identify ways that you can improve
move that incrementally as you move on.
And then another one is the safety committee.
So I would be closely involved with the safety committee if I'm welcomed.
You know, I would attempt to attend every meeting to act as a subject matter expert and
just a resource to help amplify the effectiveness of the safety committee.
Last one, accident investigations.
When an injured worker, when a worker's injured in the workplace, the two main goals
I think need to be number one, get that injured worker cared for, the best care possible.
The second thing is let's learn everything we can about how it happened to reduce the
likelihood of it happening again, and that really means organizationally helping your
team get beyond blame, get beyond scapegoating, and get to just understanding what happened
and why it happened so you can make changes to help people reduce the likelihood of injuries
moving forward.
So I really try to be very closely involved in that accident investigation process to look at are you getting to good root causes and then
Looking at actions that tie back to those root causes
If you give employees the opportunity to share and tell you about how their injury happened
You can almost get to a good nugget that makes things better moving forward
And I think that's the best way to honor whatever bad thing happened to the employee is the man. Let's learn everything
we can leverage that, reduce the likelihood of happening to someone else.
So that's kind of my philosophy around safety.
My background is clinical, several years of oil and gas, doing health and safety and
operations, environmental remediation, and before that agriculture growing up on a farm.
I still have an active class, a CDL.
I pride myself on being able to really relate to and communicate with the people who are actually
doing the work.
Everybody in your leadership team understands probably what needs to be done with your safety
program in law's control, how do we relate that down to the person who's actually turning
a wrench, driving a truck, handling a shovel, sitting at a desk, and that's where I specialize.
Okay, so our workers' comp claims a lot of them come out of the sheriff's department,
the majority of them come out of the sheriff's department. So in my time,
actually tied back to training. Absolutely, that's we've seen that. And so when I was at
agencies, and that is exactly the trend at all law enforcement agencies, and fire as
well, training accidents by far outweigh incidents in the line of duty.
And there are things that can be done to incrementally move that forward, looking at the way training
is conducted. And I actually know that pinnacles have been sending some of their team through
some specialized training on those exact types of injuries. So I would look forward to doing
a dive into there. When I work with law enforcement and when I work with emergency responders, I
think the key is helping them understand that we are not there to tell them how to police.
We are not there that's not our expertise and it never really can be, but we understand how
people get hurt in the workplace and we can give them information on how to reduce the frequency
and see especially of those training interviews.
Yeah, that's great.
Alrighty, lastly, our transition plan,
should you choose to move forward with us?
We would have a virtual meeting with county staff
and with Pinnacle and with Glenwood Insurance.
And we'd come together, set up some framework
within Pinnacle's policyholder portal
so that when you go live January 1st,
you would have, we can set up locations
in the policyholder portal that will tell us
when we report a claim, where did that claim happen?
And then when those reports come back from Tom
and from Pinnacle, we can pinpoint, okay,
we're seeing a lot at, you know, street and road.
We're seeing a lot at maybe the corner
or maybe we're seeing whatever.
So we can figure that out, sorry, that was a bad example.
But we want to set up that framework early
and then we want to do training with the staff
because we understand that this transition
happens January 1st.
It happens New Year's Eve, and when that clock hits 1201,
it would be pinnacle.
And we want to make sure that you-
You have a few employees that would be working in 12-
Yes, that's exactly it.
That's our concern.
So not only will your staff be up and ready to go claims
reporting on the next day or at that time,
but also, honestly, you'll have my cell phone.
So we're local, we're here to help you.
We want to partner with you years down the road.
This is not just a one and done.
We want to work together for premium reduction in years to come.
Safety in the workplace, years to come, and really supporting your Garfield County employees.
So thank you for your consideration.
Okay, thank you.
Mr. Staff has any additional questions?
No, I think I've got it.
Great.
Staff has.
Well, I want to make sure that you get a chance to have a couple of other questions for me.
Thank you first of all.
Thank you all for coming.
I mean, one question I have is I've recently heard, I don't know maybe it was Governor
Polis talking about making pinnacle completely private agency, I don't know if anybody else
has heard that.
I'm assuming you guys have and I don't know, I'm just wondering if that happens, will
anything change?
What I would share is that Governor Polis added in his budget proposal, the potential separation
of pinnacle from the state.
This is still very early in the process, that legislative session doesn't even begin until January, so it would be January through May.
This is something that we've seen in the past, it's never come to fruition.
I can't speak with a specific likelihood of whether or not that would or could happen.
What I can share is that pinnacle has incredible relationships with community, civic, and industry leaders.
And throughout this process, I think there would probably be very many iterations of
what this could potentially look like.
Pinnacle's mission remains the same to make sure that we protect Colorado employers and
their employees and I would say that the one struggle pinnacle has not a struggle but
currently as we can only provide that coverage in the state of Colorado, we use a partner
insurance agency to be able to provide out of state, but over 50% of Colorado employers
Now have out of state employees, especially since COVID and the changing workplace, so our top priority would be to make sure we can continue to meet the needs of Colorado employers that we remain long-term solvent, that we have incredible capital adequacy, and we continue to provide price stability.
Thank you.
Absolutely.
My only other question related to the $2,000 deductible, you know, the numbers that you ran,
because I ran actual...
We have a lot of numbers that we had got from CTSI and our loss ratio and our loss report. Did you use those numbers or how did you get to that $30,000 number? Because my number was actually lower. We used the view of claims costs over those 10 years. There may be a lack of granularity in the data that we have that could create a difference, I think that would be the most likely reason. And we're happy if you want to take another look at that to get together and fur about that.
I mean, it's still $30,000 is not much, my numbers were more like $20,000 or $20,000.
And I looked at the 10-year versus just the last three, if that impacts that.
Sarah, I think Jordan talked about the work comp statute, so what is the work comp statute?
Great question.
is briefly as you could be.
Yeah, there is a Colorado Workers Comp Act that the state has had for many years, and
that is what governs a lot of what we do, how we do it.
So we are, again, the Colorado experts in doing that, but it identifies fee schedules for
what providers can charge for claims.
It identifies the timelines that we have where it's, hey, once we get a claim in, and
we recognize there's lost time, we have 20 days to determine whether or not it's a
compensable claim, so that's our opportunity to research the claim and get all the information
we can from use.
The employer to determine is this truly workplace injury.
There's a lot of different requirements, time frames, within that Colorado work compact that
we follow.
Okay.
Thank you.
Absolutely. Any other questions? Thank you for the presentation. Thank you very much.
Thank you for having us. The whole team being here. Thank you for your time.
Thank you. Thank you.
And you're welcome to stay if you want to listen to CTSI.
Okay, so let's take you. Yeah, I want to take it.
First of all, very correct.
CTS, I get set up.
Yeah, thanks.
Good, thanks, Shelley.
Okay, we're back on the air from our recess, and I'll turn it back to you, Fred, through
the introductions.
Commissioners, on your Zoom, we have Meredith Birchim and Rhonda Kran to present to you for
CTS, I.
And I think I see both of you on the screen.
Welcome, and we also see your slides.
So, hopefully we can hear you.
Yes, good morning.
Can you hear us?
We can hear you just fine.
Thank you.
Okay.
Great.
I want to point out that I sent a files over,
and they had numbers on them in the titles.
It was the original order that we were going to present in.
We've kind of moved a couple of them around.
So if you're looking at your packet,
this is actually on the screen right now,
is files six.
You can't get more local.
Okay, and we can see your presentation if we can see in front of us, so.
Okay. Okay.
Okay, well, good morning.
We want to thank you for giving us another opportunity to come and speak to you about your county workers compensation pool.
I'm Meredith Burcham, the obviously CTSI executive director,
I've been here for about 22 years, and I have with me, again, Rhonda,
her and she came with me up in September.
She's our risk manager here at CTSI.
First of all, just a reminder that the polls were formed by county commissioners in the 1980s
to provide coverage to share resources with similar risk which we know are among just counties.
County workers' compensation pool is only made up of counties.
They're also meant to provide more of a long term commitment to our members
and has been able to prove that's been successful and CWCP is financially sound since its inception.
Garfield County has also been a member since the pools were formed and we value your membership.
As well, we will show you a little bit later in our presentation some of the savings that you
all have reached through the years and have benefited from as well as the stability and long-term
benefits that Garfield County has received for many years. Pools are unique and different from
careers. They are owned and operated by its members, which are you, the counties.
The way that the pools are structured is that the board of county commissioners
sign intergovernmental agreements to enter the pool. So you're signing on to
bylaws that all members have to adhere to. Each pool that's under CTSI,
you can see WCP is no different than the other two. In fact, that they have seven board members
members that are made up of county commissioners from the member counties as well.
There's no profit motive within the pools.
They are run differently than carriers in which there's no cash flow.
We have to operate in a basis where we fully fund our pools for the upcoming year.
The equity that is carried by the pools, we do report to the division of insurance just
to let them know where we're standing with our equity.
There are certain pool statutes that we have to fall and adhere to, but at the end of
the day, the equity belongs to the members, and the way that we and staff looks at that
is we look at that each year to determine an amount of equity that we can distribute to
be able to hold down those costs and contributions for all the counties that are members within
the pool.
In addition to that, in creating the operations of the pools, the county's best interests
are kept as the driver and the main focus.
What we do is we provide coverage that you all need to do your day-to-day operations
within your counties and obviously providing any value added services in addition to what we provide
with your coverage that you need within workers' compensation
to be able to meet those needs and accomplish that.
In saying that, the way that the pools are structured is also unique to carriers
And that we have a formula that was created to be able to collect contributions from our members to be able to cover the losses that come in and any overhead that we have to be able to operate the pools.
Do you then purchase, I guess, a be excess insurance? I'm not sure if that's correct.
for good claims. Yes, we do. We have a pool layer of 875,000 and then we purchase excess coverage
above that and we currently are with ARCH and we've been with them for probably the last 10 years
that we do look at that annually with our broker to look at, you know, if there's any other carriers
in which we can get you know a better rate for that excess coverage. We've been able to keep that
minimal for the last several years based upon our pools combined exposure and losses as well.
But in saying that so we do not actually utilize our EMOD for our formula. We have the formula that
meets the county's needs in which we subtractured it and so Ron is actually a little bit going to
kind of walk through that in a little bit more detail but just to give you kind of a high level
understanding of how the formula works and we do not individually underwrite
of each county they're sharing within the formula as pools are designed to be sharing and cost
we use three years of losses and then we also use two-year-old payroll data so it's matured
And what is also different about that is that when the commissioners work together with
CWCP to set up our formula, they didn't want any surprises.
They have to submit and use their budgets and they wanted to know exactly what they were
going to have to pay for the upcoming year.
And so therefore we do not do any 18 month audits.
If you have, you know, throughout the year, you might have changes.
is obviously within your payroll,
if you have promotions, raises, what not.
And therefore we just use your two year full mature data
so we don't have to come back
and collect any additional money
like sometimes often other carriers do.
So I think that's also important to understand
why that structure was put in place as well.
As I mentioned, we do not,
so we do not actually file that in CCI,
We are regulated by the division of our insurance, so we do have to file taxes with them and follow
workers' compensation statutes, but we only use the EMOD for the pool-wide when we have to file
those taxes. We use our formula and how we establish contributions for each member for each upcoming
year. And like I said, Ron, the homework on that a little bit more and go through that. As far as
County deductibles, the way that pools are structured and pool statues, there has to be
sharing of costs within the lost fund. And therefore, the pools actually have every
county have a different individual deductible, does not meet that requirement. So we do not
have a small deductible such as a 2000. We did mention to you that we are able to do some
of the higher deductibles, if it works, but way that we're set up for counties is so
that you are able to have lower contributions.
You have one payment that you make for the upcoming year for your contribution, and you
don't have any other deductibles throughout the year for any of your claims that come
in.
Okay.
So on our payment, then it's a lump sum payment.
It's not you not we're not making monthly payments based on payroll
Is that correct that I heard that? Okay, have you ever have we ever kicked out a county for poor poor performance?
We actually have not it takes them within the violence it takes a vote by two-thirds of the members to actually expel
a county
from the pools and so
So one thing I think that is also important is that all members of the pools within the
bylaws and that they sign in their intercom meeting agreements is that they will put in
good risk management and we have not had any counties that have not followed that.
Most of them are actually all of them are cooperative and implementing the training and policies
that our loss control recommends and we work with them to make sure that we have those
in place, and so it's not an issue, but that is there, but it's very difficult to do
or get expelled from the pool, in that sense.
Then my next question is, explain the higher deductibles to us, what is that?
So there was probably about, I guess it's been about the 10 years ago, that we had some larger
counties approach the pool, you know, is there any way that we could have a large deductible
option in which we get a reimbursement for that amount to help kind of keep down their payment
into the last one? And so at the time they analyze that internally and making sure they were within
the pool regulations of what we could do and we're able to come up with the fact that they could
have a higher deductible option with the still portion of that is sharing into
the main fund of the pool. But it's not a self-insured option. It's still being
a member of the pool. You're just the way that you're handling it is you're
offsetting what you pay into the lost fund by taking on those first dollar claims
that come in. And we analyze that for different counties. I know with CAP it works
well for you all. I think in CWCP when analyzing it, I'm not sure if it was beneficial at this
time. It was cheaper to just stay as a regular member of funding into the loss fund for your
contributions. Okay, thank you.
You're welcome. As far as the equity distribution, I think I just
wanted to touch on that a little bit. We look at that and analyze that every year. We are currently
within workers compensation there's 29 million in equity which is a healthy spot. We always want
to make sure we're not collecting too much to build up the equity because we want to make sure
that you have that money when you need it. So we analyze that annually and look at that and see if
it needs to be adjusted as far as what we collected to the lost fund and working with our actuaries
taking a conservative approach on that.
So in looking at it this year,
we were able to actually propose to the board
to give back four million equity distribution
for this next year.
Since we are running very well within our losses,
within our rates that we have,
we thought that this would be beneficial
for a lot of the counties out there
to have that deduction in their overall contributions.
As I mentioned, the way that we are structured is to be fully funded, so we have to fully
collect what we, as pools are designed and within our statutes, collect for the upcoming
year, to pay any claims and losses that come in.
I think that's important to understand.
We cannot write loss leaders and we don't have cash flow.
It's on a fully funded basis.
As far as classification codes, you know, on this $4 million distribution, that is that
go back against our rates or as an actual cash distribution.
It goes against your actual contribution, yes, rates that you would pay for next year.
So when Rhonda goes through the...
That you'll see what your contribution would be without equity distribution and then what your contribution is with the equity distribution. Thank you. Yes.
As far as the classification codes, we do use some the same codes from the NCCI. I don't know we don't have to file directly with them. Again, we also have some unique ones that we have different just for counties. Again, everything we do is for counties and we try to as much as we can, even though we're subject to.
the workers' compensation statues within the state of Colorado, whatever we can do to assist our counties.
We always make sure that we are working for them in that manner.
As far as our claims department that we have, we have in-house claims department here, where we adjudicate the claims.
We have a claims manager, Kurt Mueller, I'm sure you're all familiar with, and then we have three adjusters that sit under him.
and we work directly with our counties when we get claims that come in.
Obviously, we do everything we can to hold down those costs.
We do, you know, the SSDI, disability, Medicare offsets, whatever we can
to make sure we're holding down the cost, we work directly with our counties.
We're obviously our only clients, our members, so we pride ourselves
in making sure that we are person-formos, providing them with the service
that they need. We're very sensitive to the fact that you all have local communities,
and we know that we want to work with the boards of county commissioners and your staff
to make sure on various claims that come in that we're handling those, how you would like
for us to handle those. We also have direct communication with claimants to walk them through
their claim process, and just to be that hands-on experience with them. In addition to that,
that we also do send out monthly reports.
We make sure that all the counties know
how their county's running and how the pool is running
and how those are in comparison as well.
I know what we've done with Keith Rice
and in the past, and if we are continuing to do that,
is our claims department meets with them monthly
to kind of go over any claims and open claims
that might be out there.
Just to update them on the process,
we obviously want to close claims
as quickly as we can. We also want to assist in our return to work programs to get your employees back to work as well.
So we make sure that we do that as well. We also handle any subrogation. Obviously, we want to recover the funds if we can to hold down the costs for you all and to hold down the costs for the pool as well.
We continue to also with medical providers that designated medical providers continue
to work with who we can and that works well with the county to make sure that we can keep
those costs down, make sure that they're good to work with.
We know that sometimes in the rural areas there might not be as many options, but we definitely
want to work with the counties to make sure that they're pleased with who they need to
work with as well.
Well, as I mentioned, the by-law state that all members are required to implement good
risk management.
And so what we do at CTSI is we have lost control services.
We have a designated lost control, senior lost control specialist assigned to each county
and they work with them and keeping losses down, making sure that your counties are safe.
Working alongside with you.
We work alongside the safety committees to help with that provide quarterly reports to all the counties
We also drill down to some of the specifics what your frequency and severity are and really try to hone in on
What trainings we could do to help keep those costs down with your employees?
In addition to that we have our
Laws analysis that we do our
our loss control team meets with every county every year,
board of county commissioners,
and presents a loss analysis to them over the last five years,
and talk specifically about your county,
where your losses are.
Again, where the pool is at,
how those are comparison,
what we're doing to try to keep those costs down
and how we can work with you all to continue to keep the claims
down, provide the training that is specific
to what those main cost drivers are for you all.
In addition to that, we also just have a variety of
classes that are specific to workers comp that
this is just a small sample of that that are tailored to meet our specific needs of counties
and their county services and how it relates to workers compensation, your economics.
mix. We might have slips and falls and then also, you know, others that come up, I think
another thing to point out, we also do M-shot training to help our counties in that
that that actually might apply to them within their mining or if they have gravel pits, we
come and do that training, we do Flagler safety training as well. And then really we're always
open to, you know, feedback on if there is something that you would like to see or something
implemented. We do our best to try to really tailor that to meet the needs of the members.
In addition to that, we also do lunch and learns throughout the year. We do different workshops
specific to and we did one this year specific to workers' compensation and understanding,
you know, how to file claim. What happens to the claim and anatomy of the claim? What happens when
a claim comes in from from the beginning to the very end, just so that we're make sure that our
staff are aware of how those processes work and how they can be a part of that as well.
In addition to that, we continue to do our tech updates.
Obviously, we also have our cap pool, but there's some oftentimes crossover between some
of the two.
But we also do specific tech updates to workers' compensation and updates on legislation,
and making sure that, you know, we are in compliance with what we need to be as well.
Lastly, we also have Siri, Venzel, who is our HR specialist on staff, and I think it's
important to point out that, you know, a lot of times there is crossover with your workers'
compensation and HR-related topics that come up.
And so she's been very instrumental in helping in assisting in those type of issues that arise
and with the return to work programs and working with our counties specifically
with the claims department and the counties on workers compensation issues
and making sure you're doing the HR side as well.
Another thing too, we also do the accident investigations and that would also tie in with some
of our loss analysis and when our loss control comes out to talk to you about that and kind
of looking to see, you know, what can all of our counties do and maybe this county did this
and it really worked and so how can you implement that? We also like to share within the counties,
you know, sample policies of what worked for you, what didn't and I think that's important and again
it just highlights why the county or the county pools were created. They're unique because they
are only for counties and work with county risk, county exposure meet the needs of the counties
and trying to keep those costs down and still providing coverage to you to do your day-to-day
operations. Just in closing before Ronda actually goes into that and I guess one thing we should
say we did implement a sheriff committee to this last year, so we work, try to work
closely with the sheriffs for both of the pools and making sure that we're, we understand
law enforcement has been kind of a hot topic in Colorado and especially obviously in our
liability, but that also process over obviously to a lot of our claims we see in workers'
compensation.
And so we're really trying to work with the sheriffs that we in, in every county to make
sure that you know they are implementing policies we can assist in training or we're
sharing those policies again that other counties have and just getting
sheriffs to kind of communicate and be aware of what's happening as well and it's been very positive
as far as the feedback that we've received I'm here at CTSI.
And Meredith can we have a do we have a representative on that committee and sheriff's committee
We do not at this time, so we kind of started with just four and then we're going to continually
rotate some different shares on. So if we definitely reach out to him. And then I just want to say
too that all insurance market cycle, you're going to have hard markets, you're going to have soft markets,
you're going to have years that you're going to have a lot higher losses and lower losses and
the theory behind the pools was to provide that stability, to provide a long term benefit,
to provide no surprises, to provide transparency, to provide the ownership for the counties to have.
And I think that's just important. I also think it's just important to be transparent and full
helping out for a short-term gain in counties keep exiting pools then there could be a day
that comes and there's no capital to start to a pool and there's no more competition
and they're at the mercy of all carriers. I think it's important to try to preserve
the pools and work with the counties and the members to try to keep those in place as
a good means to be able to provide the coverage you need, at the cost you need, well, keeping
you all in control of that. Again I do also want to say if you do leave the pool and you can
rejoin at a different time but it will be subject to underwriting and if you know there might be
higher losses within the bylaws it just say that you will not bring in any member that could have
a negative adverse impact financially on the pool so for some reason you were to get kicked out
by another carry because you had high losses obviously then the pool would have to take that
consideration. So definitely not a threat or anything. I just want to provide the full
disclosure of how basically how the pools are operated and how they were structured and set
up within their bylaws. But I'm going to turn it over to Ronda. She's going to go through
a little bit more deeper diet into the actual formula and what that looks like specifically for Garfield
County. Okay, thanks. Okay. As you know, I'm Ronda Kern and I've been with CTSI for four years
and prior to that for 29 years I was in the Actuarial World so I do a lot of
the number crunching over here. The first one we're going to look at is Garfield
County's savings over the years and at the top section of this it shows 10
years and it's just showing what your contribution was before equity
distribution and then the equity distribution as you can see has increased over
over the years and then what your contribution was after equity.
And as Meredith said, each year is not the same amount of equity that's being distributed
in total for the pool.
It depends on the health of the pool, each year, and that's the category.
Can you scroll that up?
We can only see through 2022 on that.
Is there the more numbers for 23?
Yeah, 23?
Okay.
Thank you.
Okay.
Thanks for pointing that out.
So the amount we distribute each year in equity varies depending on the strength of the pool
and as Verde said, CWCP is, excuse me, really strong right now so we are able to distribute
$4 million, pardon me for a sip of water.
And so will that $4 million be similar to the 2024 equity distribution?
Yeah, 2025 is $4 million at this point, it's supposed to be voted on by the board.
2024, we distributed $3 million, and 2023 was also $3 million, and I don't have the
years prior to that memorized, but I believe they were less than $3 million.
Okay, great.
And then the lower section is all the contributions that Garfield County has made for all the
years that they've been in the pool, which you've been in the pool since inception.
So in 1985 through 2024, $16.3 million is what you've contributed.
And the total equity distribution for Garfield was $1.17 million.
And then the 7% is the return on investment.
So it's the $1.17 million divided by the $16.3 million.
The remaining equity that Garfield County has in the pool to date is $1.75 million.
And then the total equity, if you look at what we distributed, the $1.17 plus the remaining
gets you $2.9 million in equity for Garfield County.
So Rhonda, if we do change carriers and there's that equity out there, then we just, we lose
Is that equity? Is that because it goes back in against your contribution? Is that correct?
Would we lose that equity or would there be a payout to us?
Well, we hang on to the equity until all workers' compensation claims for Garfield County are closed.
Okay. And I'll let you speak to that.
And then within the bylaws it does state that there has to be if you after that happened and there was equity left for
say Garfield County, you can have to go through the board and the members to get a, you know, about to distribute that equity.
The other piece of that too is that if you were to rejoin the pool, say in five years or something, then that equity that was still in there
then would be used to offset your contribution to come back.
Second. All right, thank you.
So just the last number, oh, sorry. Sorry. So while we're here, this is how they're, if I could just ask a question about that, do all the claims have to be closed, all the indemnity claims have to be closed in order to request that equity refunded. So if the claim stays open for another 10 years, we couldn't ask for it for 10 more years. You are correct. Okay. Yes.
And just the last number on the bottom of the page.
I think we need to scroll down a little bit there.
Is the total equity as a percent of total contributions, and that's 18% since the inception of Garfield in the fall since 1985.
So how do you get to the 18% from the 7% to the 18%?
The 7% was, well the 18% is all of the equity.
So the amount that's been distributed to Garfield County, which is the second number down in the lower box.
is the $1,171 plus the remaining equity that Garfield County has, which is the $1,749.
So that gets you a total equity of $2.9 million, and we divide that by the total contributions
over all of the years.
So it's the $2.92 million divided by the $16.3 million.
So how do we get to the remaining, how do we get to the remaining equity?
I mean, that's a big number.
Yes, well, it's very complicated formula, but it basically, it's looked at each, for
each year, a number of equity, a remaining equity comes up and it's based on, partly based
on Garfield County's percent of losses as a percent of the loss fund for the pool for
that particular year.
So then you have this much equity for, you know, 1985 and then
we look at that again for 1986 and looking at all the years, 85 to 2000 board gets you
that remaining equity of the 1.7 million. So is that part of the pool? I mean, okay.
And if anybody wants some more detailed explanation of that, we can do it on a separate call and
I can walk you through how those equity numbers are determined.
Now we're going to look at in some detail the 2025 contribution formula and
I sent one
over originally.
Yeah, we have it.
So thank you.
Good.
I sent it revised one because I thought it would be easier for you to relate to if you can
see actual Garfield numbers on the right rather than just the words on the left there.
So we start with the manual premium.
So we get that by looking at actual 2023 payroll as Meredith explained earlier we used two years back
Times a rate per class code and that gets us the manual premium
So it's actually hundreds hundreds of dollars of payroll times the rate
So the total payroll or Garfield County for 2023
37.9 million which you'll see over to the right and then the manual premium that we're using in the
the 2025 contribution formula is 784,574.
And then we have a loss rate.
And if you want to look down to the bottom right,
those are actual Garfield numbers
and how we calculated the loss rate.
So we looked at three years of losses, 2020, 2021 and 2022.
And then we also look at three years of manual premium.
So we're coming up with Garfield County's percent of losses as compared to the entire pool
Which in the lower part of that box is 3.85%
We do a similar calculation for the exposure which is the manual premium
So for those three years
Garfield County's manual premium was 6.4 3% of the total pool manual premium
And then we divide, we do 3.85% divided by the 6.43%, and that gets you your loss rate,
which is 0.6 for Garfield County specifically.
Then that loss rate is then looked up in a table, which you'll see over to the left in
the middle there, loss factor table in light green.
So, if you look up your 0.6, which gives you the lowest loss rate factor that we have in
contribution formula, which is the .92.
So then, so this is kind of like an
experience, it's not an experience mob, it's kind of like this is the one way we
get to our individual losses and compared to the pool, is that? Yes, absolutely.
Yep. And then, you know, so if you have a bad year, say 2020, which is the first
year of the three, and that was a bad year, it's going to fall off next year.
because we move it, you know, and it's going to fall off, it's going to fall off.
But it works the other way too.
As it does in the experienced mod, as well, right, three years.
Yep.
And then, so we have your .92 loss factor, that gets multiplied by the manual premium, and
that gives you your initial contribution, and you'll see that in the top box to the right,
the $721,808.
dollars. And then that gets lowered by the equity distribution, which you'll see in that
same box. A little lower is $249,136 specific to Garfield County. And that gives you right
now an estimated 2025 contribution of 472, 673.
Do you have any questions on that?
no it's complicated. Again I'm and and any other time if you want to do a you
know a side call I would love to walk through this. Yeah I mean I follow that kind of
but it's it is complicated. Yep just let me know if it wants to know more and
I'm happy to do go through that. And then just I'm looking at the revised 2025
25 contribution that we sent to you, I guess a week or two ago.
So basically the first two numbers are 2024 contribution and 2025 contribution before
equity.
And then the 2025 equity we just talked about, and that gets us to the 472673 that I discussed
on the other page.
Then you can see in the next box the payroll, we used actual 2022 payroll last year,
actual 2023 payroll this year, so there was a 12% payroll increase for Garfield County
used in the contribution formula and those again are audited payroll.
Manual premium decreased in 2025 compared to 2024, many of the rates that we use from NCCI
had decreased since last year.
So, the manual premium ended up decreasing 2% even though there was an increase in payroll.
Then you can see the loss rate, big difference in the loss rate, 2024 it was 0.96 and this
year it's 0.6.
So, that ends up with different loss factors because you moved to a different spot in the
table.
So, last year?
And that's based on the three-year average, correct?
Yes.
Yeah, so you must have had the year that dropped off must have been not a great year for Garfield County so it was you it helped your calculation this year to get to your point six. It was definitely in your favor.
So then we look at the factor that's associated with that loss rate. Last year it was 0.98 and it went down to 0.92 this year.
So again, really good news on that.
And then the second page of that, I won't spend time going through all this detail.
You have it, but it's just looking at everything by classification.
If you wanted to look at cooks and kitchen staff, you could see what their payroll was, what
their manual premium was, equity distribution, and what their portion of the total contribution
for 2025 is by classification.
So when you add all those up, there's not a total line there, but it's the 472-673 that
we discussed earlier.
Do you have any questions?
No, thank you.
You're welcome.
I guess we have coasts in the sheriff's office.
Tom, I had a question if I could.
Rhonda, this is Fred.
I wanted to go back just to make sure I understood it.
When you were describing the total equity and how that is distributed back to counties,
should a county elect to leave the pool when we were listening to the previous presentation,
they talked about the dividend program that would automatically come back to a county,
should they leave, whether that's 18 to 24 months out.
And I heard you say that in this instance, should the county elect to leave the pool, the remaining equity is 1.7,
and that to obtain those dollars absent any active workman's comp claims, that that's a decision by your board.
Do I hear you right? And is that the number? I don't think so.
That is the number.
I don't think we get those dollars back.
Well, it would take a long time, because I mean, we actually have a claim that's open
since like 2010.
That's an indemnity claim, so that's what I'm saying.
We need to be married.
It would take a long time if that claim isn't closed, so that's why I asked that question.
You know, if all the claims have to be closed, including the indemnity claims, that could
be a long time.
That's correct.
And then the second part of that specific to your question, Fred, yes, it gets voted on
by the board or the members and that would be the next step and I don't think there's any reason
that it would not go back to you. Okay, vote it on. The point is just that it has to be voted on
and because it issued money so it would go back to you. But the important thing is that if you have
open claims we have to hang on to that because they're open and if something could happen
they could blow up. It's not likely but could definitely happen depending too on the age of them
And if you were to leave the pool and you had a claim that was just from this year, that's
indemnity and it's open.
I mean, there's a lot that still needs to happen over time that could change the value
of that claim.
So we have to have that money there to pay that out.
Yeah.
Understood.
Thank you for that.
You're welcome.
Okay.
Go ahead and continue, Rhonda.
I'm all set on my numbers presentation.
So we got the bottom line number.
Thank you.
That's the one we're looking at.
Yes.
Okay.
And then we're scrolling up.
I think that's really, this is just the last sheet that was in your packet.
I've already highlighted all these things, but just kind of pointing out some of, you know, the differences with
and what's unique to the pool and why, you know, it structured the way it is.
And, you know, we, that's what we have for you today as far as our presentation.
If you have any question, we definitely would take those now, or if you have any that
come up later, we're obviously happy to work through anything.
Obviously, the pools are very transparent, and we try to provide as much education as we
can to really how they operate and how they're structured and how they're funded, and so that
you understand and how it works and where your dollars are going and how those are being utilized.
Okay, thank you, Annette, were you on the line when Fred talked about the process, our decision-making process, as far as board commissioners?
We were not, no.
Fred, do you want to go through that again?
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, so Meredith and Rhonda at the beginning this morning, so today's work session.
And the purpose was to have both of these groups present to the board their approaches to workman's comp for the county and
to basically roll the sleeves up and dive deep for the commissioners to understand what the programs are.
Ask questions, evaluate it.
No decisions are made today.
Those will be for the board in a regular business meeting which they have the first three Mondays of December coming up.
And it's up to them when they want to make that decision.
Only the caveat here is if there is a decision by the board to make a change.
We've suggested that they look at that a quicker than sooner than later so that we have ramped time and we know you all understand that
with other carriers so
That date has not been set. We'll let you know as soon as we hear from the commission's of what their brothers are to do that
There may be more questions that they're interested in pursuing and we'll get those over to you
No different than the folks here in the room too, so
That's that's the process as it stands
Okay, understood. That's great. Thank you. Yeah
Thank you. We are going to continue this. I think Heather has a
Workman comp
Cost comparison is she's going to take us through
Just ask commissioner Samson. Do you want a personal break?
Good, but I have a question for them. I was going to ask how many counties are in the pool? How many counties in Colorado are in
Yeah, we have 44 counties in the pool
44 out of 66 okay thank you 64 thank you and then one more question just from me
Meredith and I don't know if this is a round a question that equity distribution
that you guys are giving back this year is that the most you've given back in the
last ten years I
believe so yes there might have been I'd have to look back
I hope I have to look back on that.
And as far as I can recall, I think we've done the 3.5, but not done a 4 million, so.
But I will get back to you for sure on that one. And so I just had put together a cost comparison, and it's not, you know, as you've heard, it's not really apples to apples because they do things a little bit differently. But they do, they do both, you know, start with the manual premium, which is the payroll times the rate classification. And so the difference between CTSI and Glenwood is that the Glenwood insurance and pinnacle is that they use different years.
And so, for Glenwood, they use the current year's payroll.
And so, I put that other, yeah, go ahead.
With Pinnacle, we be making monthly payments, right?
We have a deposit.
We have a large deposit and then monthly payments based on payroll.
We have different options.
You could do a one-time payment if you wanted.
You can do monthly installments, but it's not a deposit ahead of time.
And you could also do either monthly or quarterly reporting that's based on actual payroll for a month, and we figure that out.
So we have a lot of flexibility in how you want to pay.
Okay, thank you.
So it sounds like there's options on that.
And so that might factor in as far as the board's consideration for auditing if we could pay all at once and for appropriations.
And we pay all at once to CTS.
We do, and so that's the budgeted amount.
And so the reason I had included this was just to show that generally the manual premiums are the same.
So I put, you know, pinnacles in there using the 2023 numbers so that you can see, you know, CTSI's was 784,000, which is for this year, but using 2023 numbers, and then pinnacles would have been 790.
So they're virtually the same, and that's just the difference between the total payrolls, that next line,
the rate for job classifications, both Glenwood insurance and CTSI talked about this, the NCCI
rate, and so, you know, work-comp has to use the NCCI numbers, and really CTSI is pretty
close. They use a lot of the similar numbers, and then the Modified or Estimated Premium.
I included that, just so that's the number, that number is the estimated premium based
on the, what's the EMOD, which would be for pinnacle or the loss rate factor, which
is what CTSI uses.
And just, you know, for, for your information, the, the piece of paper or the information
that CTSI provided, you know, that 0.6 number in the calculation, it's actually, it's
It's not directly related.
And so if you look at that, they actually multiply the manual premium times the loss rate
factor.
And so their numbers, if you look, are very compressed.
And so really the loss rate factor only goes from 0.92 to 1.07.
And so it's 0.15 difference as far as what the loss rate is.
And so I think with a larger market, with the E-Mod,
you have a lot bigger spread than you have with the CTSI.
And that's really the only point that I wanted to make there.
And then the next, and that's what I essentially say.
So the experience modification factor used
is between 0.75 and 1.25 for.
So the lowest we can go on, experience the modest 0.75?
That's right.
And the highest would be 1.25, whereas with the loss rate factor used by CTSI is between
0.92 and 1.07.
So it's just a more compressed possibility there.
And so right now, I think the EMOD, as explained by Pinnacle, is calculated at 0.88 and the loss
rate factor right now is .92 from CTSI. And they also use different years of numbers.
And so the EMA that they're using for pinnacle, I believe is the last three years.
And so, and CTSI uses the three years prior to the payroll.
So they use, you know, 20, 21, 22 instead of using, you know, 21, 22, 23 or 23, 24, 25.
So that's that's a difference as well and then you know the loss ratio I just
wanted to spend a little bit just to talk a little bit about the loss ratio
and I provided another another sheet that has the historical loss ratio for the
county just the last to I don't know if I went back 10 years nope to 2015 and this
is just you know the loss ratio is the total amount that we've incurred with
with adjusted expenses divided by the total of the paid premiums.
So I think these are just interesting numbers to look at.
And I just did a year by year instead of the compressed where they do three years in
an average.
And so like for 2023, we had a, and the reason I did this was so that the board could consider
that individual loss, the loss.
That's it, yes, YLD, the individual control loss dividend.
And so, so that you can see, you know, what that, what if any that help that would be to
the county and use some numbers to support that.
So for example, in 2023, our total incurred losses were 146,000.
The premium that we actually paid was 596,000 ish.
And so we got a loss ratio of 25%.
And then for 2022, the total incurred losses were only about $58,000, $58,300.
Our total premium was $600,000, $660,000, so our loss ratio was 9%.
Then we've had, I went back a number of years because we've had years where we were almost
at 100% in 2016.
So that's just something for the for the board to consider when considering whether that
individual cost yeah the ILCD that's what that's what I've been calling it so so that's
the cost dividend plan so and then I just this is where my numbers and this is why I was
asking Glenwood insurance where they got the numbers about the 2000 deductible and it's
took some digging into the numbers that CTSI provides,
because they do do their yearly update to us
with the loss ratio and the loss and talked to us
about our losses over the years.
And so I went back and I did 2023 and 2022.
And so the total numbers of claims that we had in 2023
was 56.
We had three indemnity claims that year.
So 53 of them were medical only claims.
And only one medical claim was over $2,000, and so, and it was like 2010.
And so, the total medical costs of the claims that were not over $2,000 was $15,227.
And so, and it took some digging in because they, when they present the numbers, they have
a number that they have for reserves.
So essentially when they present the numbers they look, they appear to be much higher than they actually are because most of the money that is put in there is reserves.
And so then in 2022, the total number of claims we had was 32.
There were two indemnity claims and 30 of them were medical only.
And only again, one claim was over the $2,000.
And so the total medical cost we would have paid for the 29 claims was about $17,771.
And so, and I brought those numbers just to show what the 2000 deductible may have looked like over the past two years.
Certainly the model that Glenwood insurance did was based on different numbers.
And I don't know if they did or didn't include, you know, how those numbers, but I can dig into that more if you're interested.
But I just thought that that would be helpful when you're considering the 2000 deductible.
And then I did just want to note, and I think I put this in your package too, was what CTSI had provided for the large deductible option.
And so that's this sheet with the, I don't know if you have this one with the yellow on the top of it.
And so, yeah, that is the large deductible plan that I think Rhonda had prepared for
the county and so the really the large deductibles that they have are at $150,000, $175,000 and $200,000.
And as I've just gone through some of our total losses, since 2021 our total losses incurred
haven't been over 150,000, and that's why that would not be an economical option for the county.
And so she had put those together, and you can take a look at this if you'd like.
And it just goes through what the net incurred was.
And this goes back to 2004,
so yeah, that option wasn't economical for the county.
But I wanted to just go through that, you know, just finishing with the spreadsheet.
I explained a little bit about the deductibles and what the difference between the deductibles
are.
And I think it's right that generally, the general dividend from pinnacle is similar
to an equity distribution from CTSI, there are certainly differences, but the equity distribution
from CTSI this year is $249,000.
I think that had recently changed prior to that.
What we were quoted in September, it was $186,000.
So our final contribution as proposed by CTSI has gone down since September.
And then the last thing on the spreadsheet, the last page talks about the loss control dividend
in the ICLD. And so the cost, and so that is a 5% cost for that particular program through
Pinnacle, and the cost would be, it's 5%, it's 32,789 or 86 for this year. And that's
why I, you know, I essentially just let you know that if the loss ratio is less than 40%,
you can get a return on that. And so, and it's also and the reason I did the yearly loss ratios is because that individual loss control dividend program is only based on the prior years. I think that's it's only based on the prior years loss ratio.
So, I mean, if we do a loss control program, don't we get a 5%, if we get the cost containment,
if we get the cost containment 5%, then that would pay essentially for the ICLD program.
So that's just, I set it out in the spreadsheet so you could kind of see what the differences
are because it is a lot of information, it is very complicated.
This is the one where we, if we're gamblers, want to bet.
Well, but you're betting on yourself.
You know, you're betting on your own programs.
You're betting on, you know, the safety programs.
And I don't, I wouldn't really characterize it as betting
so much as being, I think that there's an economic incentive
than for safety, for making sure that we're doing what we need
to do from loss control prevention.
I see Nettie moving to the front table here.
The issues there is we don't have as much control.
And we don't have any control in the sheriff's office really.
Well, I think we do.
And I think that they're certainly interested.
Certainly, I think Lou would be interested in.
He doesn't want his workers in either.
So I think he certainly would be interested in learning about that.
And Tom's right, you know, they certainly don't want to be told how to do their jobs.
because they're the experts in that, but I think he would certainly be open to listening
to improvements.
I don't know that.
I think he would have an open door for that.
And Heather, just to add, as you calculated the year-over-year loss ratio for 22 and 21,
I just wanted to mention there is, on page 56 of your 95-page packet that we sent through,
So, if you had a 9% loss ratio, the return would be 15%.
Okay, 15.5% with the 25% loss ratio, the return would be 9.4.
So, this is filed with the state.
Yeah.
Okay.
That's helpful.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Did somebody else try to say something?
Okay. All right. And so then just talked a little bit about the general dividend and then the cost
containment certification. We do have a lot of those programs in place as Tom has said.
But we haven't gone through kind of with a fine tooth comb to see if we could apply or get cost containment
certification for 2025. I think the goal. It would be 2026. It would be 2026, exactly.
Just because we would need the time in order to go through and make sure that we had everything ready
that present to that particular board.
And there I have checked there are counties that have qualified for cost containment.
So I think Mesa County's one and probably many of the counties that they do this for
have that cost containment certification.
And then the final line is obviously just the bottom line premium.
And so, and I thought that this might be helpful for the board to see just side by side.
And so the bottom line premium from CTSI, and certainly there's more to it.
And I think you've heard today, there's a lot more than just the cost to the county.
There's also all the services that are provided.
And so the bottom line was 472,673 from CTSI.
And then there's four options from Glenwood Insurance and Pinnacle.
There's the 504, 858 for a zero deductible that's just side by side for the same as CTSI.
Done.
And then it's 502, 347 with the $2,000 deductible plus the ACLD plan. And then it would be $478,765 for the $2,000 deductible. So we're looking at 478,760, yes. Yes, that's the recommendation. And so, and then the final one was the $5,000 deductible, which, based on my numbers, wouldn't provide a whole lot because most of the claims are
under $2,000. Same with what you mean insurance. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the work at least that we've done
to try and make some heads and tails of all the information that you've got.
Thanks for spending the time. Good. Look at this. Yeah. And so that's all that I have.
Okay. Michelle and Ronda, do you have any other comments after hearing that?
I do not. I mean, I think that it's a good, good comparison to see that. Again, I think that,
you know, I appreciate the time today. Obviously, we want Garfield County to remain a member
in CWCP. It's been a good long-term relationship and continue to move forward. It would be so.
I think and I truly still believe in the concept of pooling that it's very beneficial for
for counties in Colorado to maintain that pool.
But we're happy to obviously go through anything deeper
with equity distributions or the loss factor
and talk through some of that as well.
Okay, thank you.
Nettie, do you have anything more that you'd like to add?
Just thank you for your time.
Thank you.
Thank you everybody for their time.
It's important to us, obviously.
Fred, anything more?
The only thing I was gonna offer at some point
I'll relay your old decision point back to this group and then also to Meredith and CTSI when you're going to make your decision.
So Commissioner Samson, any other comments?
A lot to think about.
Yeah, Heather had my head spinning.
It's an extended spend a lot of time just dig it into the numbers because it's important
that we understand how it works so that we can get the most benefit from our carrier,
whether that's CTSI or pinnacle.
So it helps to understand where the numbers are coming from and all the services that are
provided.
Thank you any other comments then we can be adjourned