Mayor Adrian Perkins on Insurance: “We Stubbed Our Toe”

Mayor Adrian Perkins admits he made mistakes in changing insurance brokers and says he will change how it's done in the future.

Perkins tells KEEL News

We definitely stubbed our toe a bit in the approach and yeah we will correct next time. We're gonna make some stumbles. We are a new administration. But the key part about that is we're gonna learn from them and be better going forward.

Perkins says there is more minority participation with the new provider. It's now at 12% which he says is not where we need to be, but it is improvement.  Perkins says he will handle this differently next time. He says will go through an RFP (request for proposals) and make this more transparent in an effort to find the best price for the city.

Initially the change was made to $50 million dollars for a single occurrence incident and Perkins says his team immediately realized that was not sufficient and they took the steps to bump that coverage up to $300 million. The city still has $815 million in overall coverage. Last year we paid $550,000 for $815 million (which did include single occurrence up to that amount). Now we paid $900,000 for $300 million in coverage.

Perkins has issued his 100 Day Report and he's proud of his accomplishments so far.

As far as his relationship with the City Council, Perkins says he often hears Councilmembers say they did not hear about certain issues and he wants a better line of communication with the Council. "It's not a broken relationship. We're going to disagree on some issues. We're going to be learning. It's not something to be too alarmed about."