Supervisor Gore was kind enough to share his priorities for the coming legislative year.
We’ve split his thoughts into two parts, last week covered energy resiliency and fire and emergency services, this week he discusses the challenges of insurance.
Disruption in insurance markets
The past five years of fire destruction has disrupted the insurance market throughout the North Bay and statewide. More than 350,000 residential policyholders received non-renewals this past year alone, with significant increases in cost and decreases in overall coverage. Moreover, we must all remember that this is not just about insurance. Seventy percent of homes in California are backed by mortgages. And as we know, mortgage companies require homeowners insurance to protect their investment in your home.
But what happens when an individual like Matt, a neighbor of mine and constituent in Sonoma County, receives a non-renewal from his insurance company despite having invested heavily in hardening his home, managing defensible space and installing a water tank for fire suppression?
Well, after many weeks of negotiations and hand-wringing, he is forced to increase his yearly premium payment from $2,000 to $10,000 or risk losing his mortgage. Meaning his monthly payment just increased by more than $650 — without any transparency over the new fire maps, without any ability to mitigate that score down and without any flexible timeline to smartly transition to other options. This is a huge issue.
In response, I was proud to stand with Insurance Commissioner Riccardo Lara this month to announce a one-year moratorium on the drop of policies in areas across the state near where fires burned this past year. This mandate will protect more than 800,000 residential policies statewide, and more than 140,000 in the North Bay over the next 12 months. And while this action represents a great start, it is really still a stop gap.
In my meetings with Commissioner Lara, we discussed the need to require transparency on fire mapping and price data, to create a path allowing homeowners to mitigate their risk scores and get insurance, and the need to build the California FAIR plan into a full homeowner policy so that the insurance of last resort is not overly expensive and under delivered.
Other challenges
These represent just a few of the many challenges we must transform into opportunities. And while I could write similar reviews of our work to reduce homelessness, increase housing, expand behavioral/mental health services and improve the health of our Russian River watershed, this destructive cycle of drought-flood-fire-flood-fire-drought demands our utmost attention.
We live in disruptive times, and a dysfunctional, fearful view of the new normal needs to be met with a more powerful version of our own new normal; one of awareness, action and resolve.
One in which we, as leaders and followers, must embrace the most important lesson coming out of our 2017 North Bay Fire siege: the mandate for what I call “imperfect, relentless progress.”
It’s all about getting busy, adapting rapidly, acknowledging successes and lessons learned, and then continuing the charge. The world demands that we adapt, and adapt we must. Join me in the fight to steer all of this change into the health and well-being of our entire North Bay community.
James Gore is the County Supervisor for Sonoma County’s Fourth District.
