Righting a wrong

When you get into politics, you soon learn that to the victor go the spoils.

Translation: the controlling political party on a board gets to choose which professional service vendors (solicitors, insurance brokers, etc.) will get a contract from the district. Both parties do it, so all you can hope for is that whichever vendor is selected is qualified for the job and can render services at a fair price. Unfortunately that isn’t always the case.

Let’s rewind to December 2009 when the Board made a controversial appointment of an insurance broker who was neither qualified nor fairly priced. I won’t rehash all the details here but you can read up on what happened last year by following this link.

Throughout 2010, we received less than stellar service from our broker, who was compensated by my estimation around $330,000. To put that in perspective, we could have hired the top three bidders from our last round of RFQ’s for less money than what this broker received. That’s a lot of cabbage for disappointing service, don’t ya think?

Fast forward to last night . . . the Board appointed a new insurance broker, WRG Insurance Group. Mr. Gulla’s firm will not accept commissions from our insurance carrier but will instead turn that money over to Neshaminy in exchange for a flat fee of $7,700 per month. This means that Neshaminy should receive a greater level of service AND reduce its bottom line by more than $200k each year.

Maybe not a fairy tale ending, but it proves that it’s never too late to do the right thing.
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