By Jordan Parker, THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
U.S. Rep. John Garamendi said in an interview with a Bay Area TV station that state Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara should step down if he’s unwilling to take on insurance companies, becoming the latest outspoken critic of Lara during the state’s ongoing insurance crisis.
In an interview with ABC 7 that aired on Thursday, Garamendi, who served eight years as the state’s insurance commissioner, said “I’ve been very concerned about the way in which the current commissioner (Lara) has conducted himself in this office.”
“Over the last three years, I have observed that this commissioner is not willing to take the hard task and the necessary task to stand up to the insurance industry,” Garamendi said. “If the commissioner is not willing to do that, and there’s plenty of signs he is not, then he’s not doing his job and he should leave.”
When asked about Garamendi’s comments Tuesday, Michael Soller, a spokesperson for the Department of Insurance said, “Garamendi’s grandstanding gets us nowhere and does nothing to address our ongoing insurance crisis.”
“Commissioner Lara is leading the most ambitious insurance reform in over 30 years, while wildfires fueled by climate change menace California like never before,” Soller said. Soller added that Lara supports bipartisan legislation introduced by Congressmen Mike Thompson and Doug LaMalfa that “would put money into Californians’ hands, tax free, to pay for home-hardening projects.”
Garamendi’s comments come as Lara navigates the state through an insurance crisis, which has seen companies stop writing new policies, raise prices or completely withdraw from the state. In California, more than half a million homeowners will face a second insurance rate hike within a year, the Chronicle reported last month.
In July, members of California’s Little Hoover Commission, an independent oversight body tasked with investigating state government operations and police, blasted Larafor not attending hearings regarding the state’s insurance crisis.
Weeks later, Lara, in an exclusive interview with the Chronicle, told a reporter he wasn’t sure when the insurance crisis would end but said his department’s efforts to pursue regulations that aim to keep insurance companies in California have paid off. Lara told the Chronicle that the end of the crisis would depend on wildfires, which have scorched more than 1 million acres this year.
Last week, the Little Hoover Commission proposed solutions to solve the insurance crisis, such as recommending that the department convene an independent panel of experts to create standards for evaluating insurance companies’ usage of private catastrophe models and suggesting the state create a working group to develop a minimum set of wildfire mitigation standards for homeowners to undertake.
