Insurance savings coming up for community

The Southlake Fire Department's rating with the Insurance Services Office has jumped from a 4 to the top rating of 1, and the department has earned the state's highest-ever recorded fire protection score: a 97.53 on a 100-point scale, according to the State Fire Marshal's office.

The ISO's 100-point scale only requires a community to score a 90 to reach the top-tier 1 rating.

The news of the improvement in the department's ISO rating will mean premium savings for both residential and commercial ratepayers. The city's rating consultant pegged those cost reductions at 11 percent and 13 percent, respectively. Southlake Mayor John Terrell said those savings for property owners could be viewed as roughly equal to a 10-cent reduction in the city's property tax rate.

The ISO rating will be effective Sept. 1, with representatives from the State Fire Marshal's Office planning a visit to Southlake in the weeks prior to that date for a formal certification of the new rating at a meeting of the City Council.

How Southlake did it

Southlake Fire Department Chief Mike Starr said the process of earning the boost to the city's fire rating has effectively been a decades-long planning effort. The bulk of the initiative to pursue a better rating for the fire department—including an audit of various city services such as water utilities and evaluating the fire department's number of on-duty officers—has been a two-year task.

The planning that created Southlake's current level of fire coverage was much more long-term, Starr said.

Fifty percent of the grading for the rating comes from the fire department's capabilities, he said.

"That covers everything from training, testing and equipment evaluations to how we handle structure fire calls and respond to emergency scenes," Starr said.

Another 40 percent of the rating comes from evaluating the community's water infrastructure for whether it is adequate to put out fires, should they arise. The last 10 percent refers to communications capabilities with the city's 911 dispatch centers.

Sixty-three fire department line personnel and eight other employees operate out of three stations spread throughout Southlake to offer coverage that both protects the community and fulfills the ISO's requirements for achieving the best rating possible, Starr said.

"We developed the plans early on, mapping out the city and developing locations to help cover ISO ratings," Starr said. "The reality is the city as a whole has been working on [the ISO re-rating], preparing for it for the last 10 years or more since we started designing the headquarters building and when we bought the DPS North location, as well as the western location which we built in 2002. It goes all the way back to when we were looking at station locations, thinking of how best to cover the city with all that in mind that one day we'd reach the ISO rating we're at today."

Jesse Williams, the Public Protection Classification Oversight Officer with the State Fire Marshal's Office, said Southlake's planning and execution are "exemplary" in order for the fire department to obtain a 1, and its high score reflects that.

"To achieve a Class 1 is absolutely a big honor, point total aside," Williams said.

The state-high record should be a big point of pride for the community, though, he said.

What it means

When Southlake began its re-rating evaluation, it started with a consultant who specializes in helping communities obtain better ratings: Mike Pietsch.

Pietsch got on board to aid the city in preparing the necessary documentation and navigating the process of evaluating the city's rating. He said he had worked with dozens of communities in Texas before Southlake, and set his expectations for ratepayer savings off of his experience in working with insurance providers and individual communities during re-rating cycles.

Residential property owners should see an 11 percent insurance rate drop, Pietsch said, as long as their property does not see changes and residents do not rework the specifics of their insurance policies.

"That's assuming all property values and perils remain the same," Pietsch said.

Commercial property owners will also see 13 percent savings if they fit into certain criteria for commercial insurance coverage, Pietsch said.

Risk factors, including the nature of an individual business and whether there are daily hazards associated with its business activities, will have an effect on the savings for any individual commercial property owner, Pietsch said.

Those risks must be evaluated on an individual basis, he said.

Southlake's philosophy

Starr said the city's attitude is what makes an achievement such as a state-record ISO score possible.

"Southlake is one of those cities that will always strive to improve no matter what the case is because there's always room for improvement no matter how good you are," Starr said. "There's no ranking higher than ISO 1, but we still can get better at what we do today."

Terrell said the savings for residents were a beneficial side effect of a basic effort to improve safety throughout the city.

"The city has, for a long time, been a long-term strategic thinker and planner," Terrell said. "We're looking for investments that are going to have good returns. The No. 1 priority is just to make the city as safe as it can possibly be. You can always say the city has reached a really high ISO rating, but that stuff doesn't happen by accident. It happens because it was planned for, and we had the right people in place to implement it. It is about the fire chief and his staff, [City Manager Shana Yelverton] and her staff, and city councils past and present. We continued with that vision until we achieved it."