TOPEKA, Kan. (WIBW) – As the price of insurance soars, Shawnee Co. commissioners are exploring options to save on insurance.
According to commissioner Aaron Mays, the cost of insurance has been overly expensive as of late. Therefore, during Monday’s Commission meeting, the committee looked at their insurance plan options and heard a presentation from Captive Insurance.
“It’s becoming less affordable for us to have insurance for the county. I mean, and this is our property, we’ve got vehicles, we’ve got buildings, we’ve got unemployment insurance, lots of lines of insurance that we offer — that we have to have in order to do business,” said commissioner Mays. “It is just getting increasingly expensive.”
Commissioner Mays also told 13 NEWS that finding lower insurance costs for municipalities is difficult because the committee has found that more insurance companies do not want to offer plans for the local governments.
“What we found increasingly that insurance companies don’t necessarily like insuring municipalities and counties, so local governments right now are having a hard time purchasing insurance at an affordable rate because companies don’t want to offer it to us, and so, in order to get it we have to pay more,” said commissioner Mays. “A lot of that is just the liability of having things like Parks and Rec., like a jail, we have a lot of employees that do dangerous jobs, things like that, and so the costs are just high for us, and even if our claims are low, the costs appear to continue to go up.”
If the committee decides to move forward with the plan, Captive Insurance will likely help administer the insurance plan to the committee. Mays says the switch will not be all at once — the process will feasibly be a slow transition over the next few years for each line of insurance the county covers.
“The sense that I got today would be that this is a transition — a slow transition over a number of years to try to get to a point where we are a little bit more self-reliant than we are right now,” said commissioner Mays.
The idea is to implement the changes on January 1, when the policy renews.
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