Mental Health First Aid and “Joe’s Story”

For the past two years, the League of Minnesota Cities Insurance Trust (LMCIT) has partnered with Fairview Hospitals to sponsor Mental Health First Aid classes. The day-long course is a national curriculum aimed at giving attendees the background and basic skills to assist people in a mental health crisis. The class size is kept small to encourage interaction and discussion—and the instructors from the Fairview staff are great.

The first year we sponsored the classes, we limited enrollment to law enforcement officers. Last year we opened the classes to any city employee, which made for a broader discussion and fostered team building within the city staff.

Eagan Police Officer Joe Moseng attended one of these classes and had the opportunity to use what he learned in one of the sessions shortly thereafter. Click here to watch “Joe’s story” (a powerful 2-minute clip). 

We hope we will be able to sponsor additional classes this fall. The courses have been certified for police officer POST credits and may meet the proposed learning objectives for the new required Crisis Intervention and Mental Illness Crisis training. Watch our website for the class announcements.

Up next: Making Progress in Going Backwards

Stay safe,
Rob

Dividends!

League staff from all over the building
 help stuff dividend envelopes every year.

Cities around Minnesota recently received checks in the mail from the League of Minnesota Cities Insurance Trust (LMCIT). In total, the checks represented $6 million in dividends from LMCIT’s recent fiscal year.

The checks represent a couple things. First, they signify a way of doing business where membership is rewarded when losses are below the expected level, and the potential “profits” are returned to members. It’s like being a member in a co-op. The dividends also signify a good year for LMCIT’s property/casualty fund. That is the fund that covers everything from property claims to liability to all the things that happen involving the cars and trucks that are owned by membership cities.

Laura Honeck, the LMCIT operations manager, agreed to answer a few questions about the dividend.

Q. Are you able to attribute the surplus in the property/casualty program to anything in particular?

A. Whether a dividend can be returned is largely based on how well members’ losses ultimately turned out during preceding years. If there’s favorable claim development in recent years, then a larger dividend can be returned. If there’s less favorable claim development in recent years, a smaller dividend can be returned. While LMCIT does its best to estimate and project what members’ loss costs will be, there’s just no guarantee a dividend will always be returned to members because it is impossible to know precisely what losses will occur or cost. Dividend amounts will vary from year to year just as they have in the past. For example, here are the total dividend returns to all members of LMCIT in the last 5 years:

2017 - $6 million
2016 - $25 million
2015 - $16.5 million
2014 - $9.5 million
2013 - $10 million

In 2016, LMCIT could return the largest dividend in its history because of favorable loss development, but it also released some money it had reserved for claims related to the Drivers’ Privacy Protection Act (DPPA). LMCIT received some favorable court decisions on these claims, and therefore could release some of the contingency it had set aside for the uncertain outcome on these claims.

For 2017, the Board of Trustees once again looked at members’ losses (property, police liability, employment liability, and auto physical damage claims were higher than average) and other financial measures, and they determined $6 million could be returned while remaining fiscally responsible to pay members’ future claims and losses.

Q. What was the smallest and largest dividend in this mailing?

A. The smallest dividend check was made out for $7 to a small joint powers alliance. The largest dividend was sent to one of our largest cities, in the amount of $80,837.

Q. How many dividend checks did we send out?

A. A total of 1,192 dividend checks were mailed!

Q. What else would you like us to know?

A. The goal of LMCIT is to manage risk—in other words, uncertainty. While LMCIT can’t always guarantee future dividends, members should be proud of their success in controlling losses during 2017. LMCIT’s hope is that loss development for prior years is better than expected as time goes on, just as it hopes losses for the coming year are better than expected, both of which would potentially allow LMCIT to return larger dividends to members in future years.

Up next: Mental Health First Aid Training Pays Off

Stay safe,
Rob

Holiday Stories

The City of Watertown decorates one of
their fire engines for the holidays.

It seems we remember the calls that happen on nights with a full moon or during the holiday season with even more clarity. As we have done in the past, we want to share a few “Holiday Stories”:

• Recently, local news sources reported about the Coon Rapids police officer who encountered a family with no money and who planned to sleep in their car on a 10-degree night. The officer was afraid the mother, father, and five small children would freeze if they slept in the car. He was not able to find a place for them in an emergency shelter. The officer got them to a local hotel and paid for the room himself. He has asked the department not to identify him by name.

• I was at the City of Savage’s main fire station a few days before Thanksgiving. Just as the training session was getting started, there was a knock at the door. It was a woman from the neighborhood who was bringing fresh-baked pies to the firefighters to thank them for their service to the community. She seemed embarrassed that the firefighters were thanking her. 

• I worked for a police chief who had obtained a confession from a bank robber earlier in his career. As with most interviews, the two got to know each other a little bit during their conversation. The chief had a style that made people want to talk to him—even bank robbers. The robber eventually went to federal prison, and every Christmas the chief got a Christmas card from the man in prison. He would post it on his office door and smile.

• Christmas Eve in 1983 was particularly cold and windy. I remember the high was -9F, and overnight it dropped to -25F. The wind and cold made it painful to be outside. It was so cold that churches canceled their Christmas Eve services due to the weather. I was working an overnight shift, and it was rare to see another car on the road. Then I drove up on a beat-up old car with a flat tire. The car was on the shoulder of the highway with a mom and three kids inside. If it is possible to look poor, they looked poor. They were trying to get to a relative’s house two hours away. They had no cash, but they had a spare tire, and it had air in it.
  
  An officer from a neighboring city, Dave, drove up to check on me. Apparently I was not hearing my radio, as it was buried under a couple of layers of quilted vests and my winter jacket. I had not responded to the dispatcher checking on me, and they sent Dave. Upon hearing this family’s plight, Dave said, “Shall we go for it?”
  
  With that being said, we moved the family into the two police cars and began to change the tire. It was so cold that Dave would work a minute and then run back to his car, then I would run to the car and pick up where Dave left off. It was often just a few turns of the lug wrench and then back to the car to warm up. We kept that tag-team system going and would tell each other how much progress we made as we passed each other. The kids loved it and laughed as they watched us race back and forth. We had them on their way again in about a half hour.
  
  Dave has retired, and when I saw him recently we reminisced about the family with the flat tire. Imagine all the stuff we had seen and experienced in our two police careers, and it is interesting that we like to remember the family with the flat tire on Christmas Eve. 

Up next: A Dividend for LMCIT Members!

Stay safe and happy holidays,
Rob