MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — The Monongalia County Commission has announced new insurance costs for general liability, workers’ compensation and health plans for county workers.
Through the West Virginia Community Risk Pool, the county’s general liability and workers’ compensation plan is effective July 1, 2020 and comes with a slight increase.
“The total policy is $736,148, the general liability portion of that is $544,647 per year which is a seven percent increase over last year or 1.32 percent,” Commissioner Sean Sikora said. “So, it’s a very modest increase.”
The workers’ compensation portion of the policy increased 6.9 percent to $191,501 per year.
Commissioners were able to avoid a health insurance premium increase of more than 25 percent, but the the annual health insurance premium will go up slightly to $4,754,262.
“A 9.5 percent increase, but as you are aware when we first started talking to the insurance companies we were looking for an increase in the mid twenties,” Sikora said. “We got it down to about 9.5 percent.”
Dental coverage premium for county employees went up about 4 percent.
The commissioners decided to keep employee contributions the same as last year and absorb the increase.
“There are so many changes going on and with the uncertainty of what’s happening financially in our community we wanted some stability for our employees,” Commissioner Tom Bloom said. “We believe we can pick it up and still deal with this crisis.”