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Typically a hard sell to cost-conscious employers, a program offered by The Hartford boosts sales

When employers open their doors to renewal presentations for their employee benefits, they usually are listening for ways to lower their cost-or at least limit the steady increases in health care premiums. Most aren’t prepared to discuss purchasing new employee benefits, even if they realize that loss of income from non-occupational disability is a big concern for both management and employees.

It takes a well-prepared producer, armed with extensive product knowledge and a vision for the value of short- and long-term disability insurance, to market STD and LTD products these days, says Tony Bruns, an account executive with Southwest Business Corporation (SWBC) in San Antonio, Texas.

SWBC is a full-service insurance agency and financial services firm that provides personal and commercial property/casualty insurance, employee benefits and mortgage brokerage, among other services. The company has about 700 employees and has been in business since 1977.

Employee benefits has been his focus for about 10 years, Bruns says, and in that time he has seen the complexity of the business increase dramatically. Health care costs dominate employer concerns regarding their employee benefits program, even though most executives admit that the needs of their employees go far beyond managed care, deductibles and coinsurance clauses.

“In the past two or three years, it has taken more and more effort to get employers to open up their pocketbooks to improve their benefits, and in most cases, disability benefits have been a difficult sell,” Bruns observes.

“Every agent or broker has disability insurance in his spreadsheet-that presentation document that costs out coverage and delivers the bottom line to clients,” he says. “But if you are going to be successful in selling disability and other employee benefits beyond health care, you have to come with a lot more than your spreadsheet.”

Learning locally

Bruns is working on bumping up disability products to his number two target, right behind health care renewals-and says he finally has the information and resources to make the better pitches. He is one of 150 graduates of The Vault, a disability benefits education seminar provided by The Hartford Financial Services Group.

The Hartford had traditionally provided the continuing education and product training program at its home office, but after delivering more than 5,000 hours in 2006 the insurer decided to take its disability program on the road in 2007.

Bruns says producers can expect a comprehensive overview of STD and LTD products and policy terms plus the industry background that can help them create more effective presentations for their clients. The program is general in nature and is not restricted to Hartford products.

Specifically, the program trains producers to:

* Identify trends that affect employee productivity, and develop appropriate solutions and plan designs.

* Navigate sophisticated contract language, benefits, underwriting and pricing levels and explain claims and service issues.

* Diagnose and respond to an employer’s group disability needs and goals.

Participants also earn continuing education credits for life and health insurance licensing in most states and can test for the National Underwriter’s Group Disability Benefits designation.

The insurer has scheduled the three-and-a-half-day program in six cities this year: Avon, Connecticut; Philadelphia; Cincinnati; Chicago; Maitland, Florida; and Palm Springs, California.

Steve McConnell, assistant vice president of marketing at The Hartford, says the program is designed to be comprehensive, beginning with an assessment of market opportunities, proceeding through a detailed analysis of policies, terms and conditions available from a range of disability insurers, and continuing with an examination of risk management profiles of typical customer situations.

The small employer market-fewer than 100 employees-is particularly ripe for producers, he notes, with nearly half of such employers not yet offering disability insurance.

“It really is an eye-opener when you drill down into the disability products, the various policies and services and the case studies of how the benefits meet contemporary risk management needs,” Bruns says.

Errick Engert, an employee benefits producer in the Dublin, Ohio, office of The Hylant Group, also attended the program. Hylant is a large insurance brokerage with nine Midwestern offices providing property/casualty insurance, employee benefits and risk management services.

“The program was very enlightening and helped highlight the importance of having a good disability benefit program for your employees,” he says. “It was a terrific program for preparing you to discuss disability benefits with your clients.”

Bruns agrees. “I left the program with an even higher degree of confidence in my ability to assist my clients and the motivation to help them solve a tremendous need that they should be concerned about,” he says. “Disability insurance has moved from being an afterthought to one of the foremost goals for my renewal presentations.”

This note investigates the extent to which the regulatory frameworks governing property rights, and the transaction costs these frameworks produce, impact natural resource development on government land. This note examines the legal regimes for offshore petroleum exploration and production as conducted by the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom to determine how the resource management policies of these two countries affect commercial oil activity in their respective national waters, focusing specifically on continental shelf leasing in the Gulf of Mexico and offshore licensing in the North Sea. ‘ Both the United States and the United Kingdom obtain a significant amount of their domestic oil production from these offshore areas,2 but they have chosen to pursue substantively and procedurally dissimilar lease arrangements. Most important, leases in the Gulf are much smaller than North Sea license blocks.3 This note analyzes the primary differences between the two systems, and the incongruities and inefficiencies they produce, by examining several variables to determine the extent to which the legal regimes manipulate natural resource development. Scholars of the subject point out that a closer study of these distinctions and their influence will have “important implications for leasing policy, especially for the [Outer Continental Shelf], because changes in the block sizes will affect the probability that there will be competitive exploitation,”4 but heretofore it does not seem the topic has been addressed in legal literature.5 The regime in the Gulf of Mexico, as compared with the regime in the North Sea, should engender economic inefficiencies that will result in both (a) higher costs for companies through redundant capital investment in production facilities and excessive administrative compliance costs, and (b) faster depletion of oil reservoirs because of competitive extractive behavior. These two factors remain distinct and are examined separately in this note, but both factors should reflect the inefficiencies created by higher transaction costs in the U.S. system. This note empirically examines these factors and predicts that the regime governing leasing in the Gulf of Mexico will create economic inefficiencies and thus U.S. policy should be reformed to resemble more closely the offshore legal regime of the United Kingdom.

The First Supply riverfront property at, 106 Cameron Ave. in downtown La Crosse is being sold to make way for a new condominium and commercial development.

The commercial development could be offices or a hotel, Onalaska developer Jon Sopher said Thursday. Sopher and asyet-undisclosed partners are still putting together plans for the property.

“It really will be a mixed-use development,” Sopher said, including condominiums and some type of commercial development.

“It is so fresh,” Sopher said. “We are still putting our preliminary plans together.”

He did not have additional details to announce Thursday.

First Supply’s two buildings will be demolished to make way for the project.

First Supply President Joe Poehling said Thursday his company has agreed to sell its downtown location to Intrust Development LLC for an undisclosed price. Sopher owns Intrust.

“We are going to stay on the site until Dec. 31, 2005,” Poehling said. “We have until January 2006 to relocate” somewhere in the La Crosse area.

First Supply, founded in La Crosse in 1897, is a familyowned wholesale distributor of plumbing, heating, cooling, municipal, waterworks, fluid handling, builder and industrial supplies in the upper Midwest. It sells to industrial customers and to contractors, and has annual sales of about $200 million.

The company has 14 distribution locations in the Midwest. Its LaCrosse location always has been downtown. Its current headquarters, warehouse and showroom have been at 106 Cameron Ave., just south of the Cass Street bridge, since 1970.

The definitions of “riot” and “vandalism” carry significant weight

In light of recent civil unrest occurrences, it is almost certain that owners and lessees of commercial buildings, as well as business insureds, will be asking coverage questions.

Disturbances ranging from protests at international banking meetings to violence in the streets have become a major matter of concern. Strikes that result from labor disputes can escalate into violence. Turmoil and bloodshed in the inner cities frequently follows the use of firearms by police. Disturbances resulting from the enforcement of immigration policies are ongoing, as are demonstrations by immigrants on issues relating to events in their native countries. Likewise, demonstrations by environmentalists and other activists can generate the type of commotion that requires intervention by law enforcement officers.

Many of these occurrences can involve damage to commercial property, buildings, and their contents belonging to property owners other than those who are the object of the protests.

Definitions

In order to understand the way in which property insurance applies, one must begin with the meaning of pertinent terms. “Riot”-with which we are primarily concerned-is covered under direct damage provisions of commercial property insurance written under named peril forms and those that cover perils except as specifically excluded. Note that the term is not specifically defined in policies.

Travelers is a business of The St. Paul Travelers Companies Inc., a leading property/casualty insurer selling primarily through independent agents and brokers. The company’s diverse business lines offer its global customers a wide range of coverage in both the personal and commercial settings, including automobile, homeowners, construction, small business, oil and gas, ocean marine, financial and professional services, global technology and public sector services.