Texas Municipal League Intergovernmental Risk Pool

CREATED BY LOCAL GOVERNMENTS, FOR LOCAL GOVERNMENTS In 1973, the Texas Legislature passed legislation mandating that Texas cities provide workers' compensation coverage to their employees. At that time, most traditional insurance companies refused to write the coverage or quoted exorbitant rates. For those reasons, the legislation also authorized the creation of the first municipal risk pool in the United States, which was the predecessor of the TML Intergovernmental Risk Pool as we know it today. In 1982, cities saw other coverages becoming scarce and expensive, so TML created a liability fund that year and a property fund the following year. (In the mid-1980s, the U.S. insurance market essentially crashed.) According to Time Magazine, that was “a time of frantic efforts to obtain insurance that, at best, was available only in limited amounts with high retentions at exorbitant rates.” The Pool truly came into its own during that period, and – today – the Pool provides workers’ compensation, liability, property, and cyber coverages to over 1,000 cities and hundreds of other local governments.