About Donner Pass Insurance Services
Global insurance experience. Small-town service.
Donner Pass Insurance Services is an independent agency based in Truckee and serving Truckee, Lake Tahoe, Reno, Northern Nevada and communities throughout the Sierra.
DPIS was built to bring decades of institutional insurance-company and risk-management experience down to the local level — in service of an amazing community whose challenges are as varied and individual as the people who live and work here.
Why DPIS Exists
Serious insurance knowledge should still feel personal.
Insurance can become distant very quickly: large companies, changing underwriting rules, complicated forms, carrier decisions and layers of jargon. DPIS exists to make that expertise useful at the community level.
That means being reachable, taking the time to understand the situation, explaining what matters in plain English and helping people navigate the market without treating them like a policy number.
The idea is simple: bring big-market insurance knowledge home and put it to work for the people, families and businesses that make this place what it is.
The DPIS F.I.R.E. Philosophy
Focused. Independent. Rooted. Experienced.
Those four ideas shape how we built Donner Pass Insurance Services and how we want clients to experience the agency.
Focused
We focus on property & casualty insurance. No investments. No health insurance. Staying in one lane allows us to go deeper into coverage, underwriting, carrier appetite and the problems our clients actually bring us.
Independent
We are not tied to one insurance company or one product shelf. We work for our clients and use broad access to admitted and specialty markets to look for the right fit for the risk.
Rooted
We live here, raise our families here and spend our earnings here. There is no national call center standing between the client and the agency. Our reputation lives in the same community we serve.
Experienced
More than 25 years inside large insurance and financial-services organizations gives us institutional perspective that we bring down to the local level and apply one client at a time.
Our Community
One region. A remarkable range of people and risks.
Truckee, Tahoe, Reno and Northern Nevada are connected, but they are not one-size-fits-all communities. Our neighbors include contractors and tradespeople, restaurant and hospitality operators, entrepreneurs, families, remote workers, second-home owners, long-time locals, new arrivals and people building businesses across the California–Nevada line.
The insurance challenges can be just as varied. A mountain home, a growing Reno business, a construction project, a seasonal operation, a family adding a new driver or a company dealing with cyber risk may all require a completely different conversation.
That variety is not something to simplify away. It is the reason listening first matters.
Experience Behind the Agency
Institutional knowledge, brought down to the local level.
Steven Cooper, MLIS®
Donner Pass Insurance Services was founded by Steven Cooper after more than 25 years working across financial services, insurance, risk management and client advocacy.
That background includes the institutional side of insurance — understanding how large organizations, carriers, underwriting systems and complex risk decisions work — and bringing that perspective into a smaller independent agency where clients can actually reach the person helping them.
Steven first spent meaningful time in Truckee during the winter of 1997–98, bought a home here in 2012 and now lives and raises his family in Truckee.
Management Liability Insurance Specialist
The MLIS® designation from IRMI reflects specialized study in management and professional liability exposures, including cyber and privacy liability, employment practices liability, directors and officers liability, fiduciary liability and related business risks.
What Local Means to Us
Being here should make us more useful.
Local does not mean pretending every problem is uniquely Tahoe. It means understanding the community well enough to know when local conditions matter, when they do not, and when a broader insurance-market perspective is more important.
It means knowing that the needs of a Truckee contractor, a Tahoe homeowner and a Reno business can be very different — and respecting those differences rather than forcing everyone into the same template.
Most of all, it means building an agency that is accessible, accountable and useful to the community around it.
Truckee · Tahoe · Reno · Northern Nevada
Useful guidance. Realistic options. Straight answers.
We are proud to build Donner Pass Insurance Services here and to serve the people and businesses that make this region such an extraordinary place to live and work.