Let's go ahead and call to order.

This employee benefit cost workshop for August 11th, 2026.

Who's going to start us off?

Oh, do we have any public comments?

Excuse me.

So I think we are finally at eight and one.

Todd over here with Alara is going to kind of do a high-level presentation again, kind of a scale-down version of state of health care, kind of just recapping what we've done for the public, and of course, for our teams.

Just kind of updating y'all, we've met with every single department, or at least a good portion of everybody, and I would say

two

thirds.

Yeah, at least two thirds.

Gotten a lot of good feedback.

Put fact sheets out there, so we got a lot of information out there, and uh I'd say a lot of great feedback on the direction that we're going to be presenting tonight.

So there, with that, turn it over to

you.

Thank you.

So presentation up there.

So I'll go ahead and get started.

My name is Todd Peter, and I'm a senior partner with the Alera Group.

And I've been doing employee benefits for too long.

Uh like this is my thirtieth year.

Um is a national firm.

Um, and it's basically kind of known for buying small boutique uh firms.

Um, so maintaining kind of a local presence and a high touch, but having all of the national tools.

Um I ran benefit solutions here for twenty-five years, and uh kind of our tagline was Hill Country Values National Strength.

So this kind of fits in with the kind of folks that I want to work with.

Um, an exceptional team of people working with uh your management team here.

Um, it's it's been fun to work with them.

So our kind of our pillars of the services that we offer are employee benefits, uh, risk management, wealth management to include retirement plans and individual insurance.

Uh we're top ten in wealth management, top fifteen individual, and I think we're around twelve to fourteen in risk management employee benefits.

Um, so quite a bit of benefits uh uh under management.

So first, uh, your Blue Cross renewal, which was really ugly.

Um, and we're seeing that unfortunately across the market space, and a lot of our our clients.

With Blue Cross Blue Shield.

Right now, right now we're seeing an average of a twenty-eight percent increase across all market segments, and that's before they consider your claims.

So that's a super healthy group, a bunch of young bucks that aren't using a lot of medications, et cetera, they're still seeing very large increases.

So you guys are not alone.

It's it's something that's happening across the board.

So your uh renewal with Blue Cross Blue Shield on your fully insured plan was a 42% increase.

We were able to negotiate that down to roughly a 32% increase, which is still a tough pill to swallow.

So obviously, we were looking at some other alternatives for

you.

So we sent out the information for the city of Kerrville to many different carriers, different funding mechanisms from fully insured, self-insured, level funded.

If you notice there, the proposal status, a lot of companies decline to quote in the large group market, unlike the small group market, they don't have to provide you proposals.

So if they don't feel like they're competitive or they're scared of your risk, they just don't provide a quote.

So some years you would have many more options presented than than what you guys have made available to you this year.

Whoops.

So the medical marketing summary on the fully insured market.

Your renewal, like I said, with Blue Cross was a 42% increase.

We negotiated that to 32.

We also received proposals from United Healthcare with a 29% increase and a 33% increase.

And I would argue that those plans were not as good as what your current plan is either.

And the network is far subpar basically to the Blue Cross Shield network.

Down at the bottom, you see all the self-funded proposals that we received.

And what we're looking at for you guys is the 125,000 individual stop loss, expected costs a little over $6 million.

So this is the main slide, probably the most important slide of any of the ones we have.

This is the reason why we're looking at going the self-funded route.

This is a slide that was created by an actuary in our office, and I would argue that this is extremely conservative.

The blue cross line that you see there, they're assuming roughly a 10% increase or a medical trend increase over the next five years, and I think that's dreaming in color a little bit.

I would expect that that number those numbers would be a little bit higher than that in actual uh reality.