A little bit of Pinnacol trivia... life as a state agency

Unless you've been hiding, or lucky enough to be on vacation, its been hard to ignore that Pinnacol has been in the news quite a bit lately. I'm not going to comment on the coverage; we have an outstanding Communications team to handle that! What's apparent in a lot of the coverage is an underlying debate about whether Pinnacol would be better off as a regular state agency. Today we are not a state agency, but rather a quasi-public authority, meaning that we operate like a domestic mutual insurance company for the benefit of our policyholders and their employees. I was looking through our history and found this interesting tidbit about what life was like for our employees when we were an actual state agency (from 1915-1987):

The “State-Way”

The most difficult aspect of being a state employee, according to many former and long-time employees was complying with state budgetary requirements and whims of elected officials. Just a few examples:

The oil crisis in the 1970’s meant employees did without much heat in the winter or air conditioning in the summer. Employees who worked at the Fund’s offices at 1313 Sherman (referred to by some as the White Elephant) worked with coats and gloves on in the winter and suffered through extreme stuffiness and heat in the summer because the windows were sealed shut for energy conservation reasons.


The Fund was under the state budgetary system and had to follow the lead set by the Joint Budget Committee, even though taxpayer dollars were never used to support the agency. So if the Governor called for a 10 percent cut of all agencies, the Fund was required to follow.

Felt tip pens were absolutely forbidden (they were a luxury according to Governor Lamm) and pencils were hard to get. New pencils were not given to workers unless the workers could produce a pencil stub which had to be so small it wasn’t of use anymore. Only auditors were allowed mechanical pencils and even they had to justify their use. Calculators were another luxury. Four adjusters often shared one calculator. Calculator tape was also a tight commodity; both sides had to be used before new tape was given.


Not only was it difficult to obtain supplies under the state system, it was also difficult to increase staff to meet increasing workloads. Staffing did not significantly increase for the Fund until 1987 when the Fund became an Authority and was no longer under the state budgetary controls.


Fund employees in the 1960’s, 1970’s, and early 1980’s were used to doing a job complicated by a cumbersome state budgetary system. But it was a job they did with a lot of pride. In the 1970’s the Fund was used to set up a workers’ compensation bureau for the government of Thailand, who’s own compensation system was reported to be a disaster. A Fund employee helped create the Thai workers’ comp bureau and a Fund underwriting manager later traveled to Thailand to follow up on the program.

(source: 1995 Annual Report for the Colorado Compensation Insurance Authority - the predecessor to Pinnacol Assurance)

I don't know many people who would like to work under the conditions described above. We take a lot of pride in those former employees. We recognize that the company we are today was built on the foundation and hard work of those who came before us. We've come a long way from those state days. Today we have all of the resources we need to do our jobs and serve our customers. As the media is quick to point out, we're far from perfect, but I think most our our employees would prefer to move forward into a future geared towards continuous improvement rather than to return to the past. I'd hazard a guess that most of our customers might also agree.