The Lafayette City Council held a regular meeting on March 24, 2026, featuring a quasi-judicial training session by SERSA, a presentation on the 2026 City Council Retreat summary, discussion of potential 2026 ballot measures, and several new ideas from council members.
I know it's time to start mining. I can listen to this idea of getting back out on the road. So what you're thinking about. Crazy like that. March twenty-fourth, twenty twenty-six. A couple agenda items tonight, and we will get right into the first one, which is our quasi-judicial training. Welcome Sam Light from SERSA. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Council. Thank you, staff, for having me out. Good to see you all again. Spend a little bit of time. I understand I got a couple of new faces on the council as well, correct? Yeah. All right. Well, congratulations to the new members. Um, by way of further introduction, I'm Sam Light, and I'm the deputy executive director and general counsel for an organization called SURSA, which is an acronym for the Colorado Intergovernmental Risk Sharing Agency, which is kind of a mouthful, which is why we call it SERSA, right? So we're the city's insurance for provider for property and casualty insurance coverage, right? So the bread and butter things that we do is obviously get the insurances in place for everything from your properties like this building to your vehicles, both for autophysical damage and vehicle liability to kind of the more interesting risks and exposures that public entities face, things like we provide the police uh law enforcement liability coverage for your police department. We provide the coverage that protects you against what we call Colorado Governmental Immunity Act tort claims and slipping falls, property damage, personal injury. Perhaps of interest to you all is that we provide public officials liability coverage. Wonderful, right? Which protects you and provides you liability protection for alleged claims of wrongful acts, is what they call it under the coverage document. That's the only issue. That's the nomination that the council or council members in their official capacity may have violated someone's rights or violated a statute giving rise to some civil liability. So that's the bread and butter stuff that we do. But SERSA is a little bit different than a commercial insurance carrier. We are what's called a public entity self-insurance pool. We are owned and controlled by our members. The phrase public entity is important there because our only book of business, our only members are Colorado cities and towns and affiliated entities. So we ensure about 90% of the cities and towns around the state of Colorado. And being part of a pool is we kind of share this attitude towards risk management with our members. We're a public entity ourselves at CERSA. So we're an extension of our municipal members. And so the way that informs our approach to risk management is kind of the shared attitude that we're all in this together, right? And proactive risk management is an important part of that commitment, right? To being good stewards and fiduciaries of the interest and assets of the city and for us for the pool as a whole. So the way that influences our approach to what we offer our members is in addition to doing the bread and butter stuff, we all offer all sorts of risk management resources. And the one that I do most often is trainings for elected and appointed officials and staff around liability risk issues. For you all this evening, we're going to talk about risk exposures and best practices for quasi-judicial proceedings, which in our world uh is a source of potential civil liability, particularly if there's missteps, right, in the way we handle quasi-judicial proceedings. So we're going to spend some time uh talking about those issues and providing you all uh with with some training. So let me just make sure I can advance the slides and we'll dive right in. So here's kind of an interesting fact. For the new members, who are the new members since uh last election? Congratulations. So, quasi-judicial rule to you is kind of a new thing, is that a little bit? You've been exposed to this issue, been involved in some of these proceedings. So here's an interesting point. In Colorado, right? It's not true in every state, but in Colorado, we have the power locally, right, to make decisions affecting individuals' protected property rights.