Park District Approves Insurance, Risk Management Proposal 

April 18, 2024 by Brian Doering

The Geauga Park District Board of Commissioners voted in favor of a property and liability program for insurance and risk management during its April 15 meeting. 

Executive Director John Oros said GPD was presented with two proposals — one from Public Entities Pool of Ohio by Summit Insurance and the other from Ohio Plan Risk Management by Hylant Administrative Services. GPD decided to go with PEP. 

“We’ve worked with Ohio Plan Risk Management at one time when I first took over as executive director. We switched to Public Entities Pool of Ohio and the reason we did that is that we felt they provided better services,” Oros said. “At that time, they (Ohio Plan Risk Management) were at a lower cost than PEP for a while.”

He highlighted that OPRM undervalued GPD’s assets by $5,154,000.

“OPRM did provide a lower premium (contribution). The reason we don’t feel it makes the cut is that we provided OPRM with our current plan and the value of our assets,” he said. “I don’t know how you undervalue our assets by $5 million.”

Park Commissioner Jolene Carnabuci requested GPD to evaluate its annual insurance and risk management policy costs last year, according to an April 9 memorandum from Oros. 

When comparing insured value amounts for buildings, personal property, scheduled and unscheduled property, computer equipment and software, a difference of $5.9 million was shown between the two proposals with PEP having greater insured value than OPRM by 18%.

“I feel that PEP is a much better risk manager than when we were with OPRM. We’ve got pretty robust risk management services with PEP,” Oros said.

In other business, park commissioners approved: 

• A contract award to Dunbar Mechanical, Inc. in the amount of $52,140 for HVAC improvements to Observatory Park in Montville Township. 
• The countywide 911 plan per section 128 of the Ohio Revised Code