The Town of Cazenovia was honored this week with the New York Municipal Insurance Reciprocal (NYMIR) Risk Management Award, which is given annually in recognition of a town’s commitment to sound risk management, safety and training efforts.
The award was presented at the 2018 Annual Meeting and Training School of the Association of Towns of the State of New York held this week at the Marriott Marquis in New York City. The general session was attended by more than 1500 town officials from across New York State.
The award’s inscription reads: “In recognition of a commitment to sound risk management, safety and training that makes a difference.” The award was presented to Highway Superintendent Timothy Hunt by the Association of Towns Executive Director Gerry Geist together with NYMIR’s Executive Director Kevin Crawford.
“Effective risk management requires a team approach, everyone working together to reduce the liability and exposures which are inherent in so many local government operations,” said Crawford. “The town has a group of officials and employees who take risk management into account and are proud to do so. Likewise, NYMIR is proud to recognize their efforts with this award today.”
Cazenovia was chosen because of the innovative way in which its town board and highway superintendent have collaborated on a model vehicle replacement program which has stabilized the town’s spending on highway vehicles and kept repair costs low while insuring a more effective, efficient and ultimately safer means of maintaining the towns extensive inventory of streets, sidewalks and other public works infrastructure.
The town’s overall loss ratio is among the very best of NYMIR’s more than 880 local government members.
Of critical importance to that record is a second innovation designed by Hunt whereby members of his department can use their PDAs to upload photos and descriptions of every sign, culvert, guardrail and other critical elements of the town’s infrastructure so that they can be inventoried and monitored on a real time basis.
NYMIR is a non-profit, statewide property and casualty insurance program for New York State’s local governments.
