Message From the President/CEO

As we enter the holiday season and prepare for 2023, I wanted to provide an update on Public Entity Partners’ efforts over the past year.

Since our inception 43 years ago, we have remained focused on providing members with effective risk management practices and training, and our success is rooted in our relationships with members. We are an extension of your staff, partnering with you to reduce the likelihood of a claim so that your employees can return home free from injury. In turn, you are able to deliver services to citizens with fewer lawsuits or claims. This is critical for PE Partners, your city or local agency, and each of our team members because we live in a number of our partner communities.

We made several staff adjustments this year that will reap great benefits for our members:

• George Dalton has been promoted to executive vice president. George most recently served as vice president of risk services and will now have a leadership role with more of our internal-facing departments and our risk services team.
• In the underwriting department, Halie Gallik has transitioned to director and Janine Helton is assistant director. Both ladies have been with PE Partners for 14 years, and have a tremendous understanding of our organization and members.
• In loss control, we look forward to partnering with MTAS on a regional risk management training series. Sarah Curtis, our new loss control training consultant, will present risk management topics each quarter.
• Chester Darden was named director of loss control approximately a year ago.

Also this year:

• In October, we renewed our property reinsurance program. Although it is a challenging period for the property reinsurance market, I am pleased to report that our pool increased the upper limit of property reinsurance from $200 million to $500 million. Given the storm activity, flooding events and wildfires our state has experienced in recent years, we feel this provides a higher level of stability for our membership.
• We continued to see increases in property values and construction costs. These factors impact property premiums, and while this funding year did not include a base rate change for the property program, value increases have affected our members.

As a governmental pool, we function in many ways like an insurance company. For example, we invest funds received from members’ premiums for investment income to help offset members’ claim expenses. Over the past year, our investment portfolio has been impacted by fluctuations in the financial markets. Thankfully, our organization has always taken a conservative investment approach, which helps us weather downturns in the market.

Earlier this month, our board, consisting of nine elected officials and city managers from throughout the state, convened with our leadership team for our second strategic planning session in two years. The results of this effort will help guide our organization as we continue to meet members’ needs, while proactively preparing for upcoming challenges and opportunities.

In the next few weeks, we will close out three major actuarial studies — an annual reserve study, capital adequacy study and premium rate study. These studies help ensure that our reserves are adequately funded, our base rates accurately capture the risks we write, and, in the event of a catastrophic loss within our pool membership, we are financially positioned to continue serving you going forward.

As always, thank you for entrusting us with your property and casualty risk management needs. If we can ever be of assistance to you and your municipality, don’t hesitate to contact us.

May God bless each of you and your communities, and we wish you Happy Holidays and a very Merry Christmas.