Sacramento, CA – Legislation creating a fully transparent public wildfire catastrophe model was signed by Governor Newsom late Friday. The law will give consumers the ability to push back on secret wildfire risk algorithms insurance companies use to raise rates in California. The legislation, SB 429, was authored by Senator Dave Cortese. It charges California universities and the Department of Insurance with creating the model and funding was approved in the 2025 budget.
“Homeowners are fed up with insurance companies’ black-box models that penalize consumers for fire risk but refuse to explain how they calculate it. Even when they do everything to protect their homes from wildfires homeowners face extreme price hikes or lose their insurance completely. A fully transparent wildfire modeI will level the playing field and empower consumers to keep their insurance and make their homes and communities safer,” said Carmen Balber, Executive Director of Consumer Watchdog.
SB 429 requires full public access to all aspects of the wildfire catastrophe model, including all “documentation and programs” and “underlying data and algorithms” of the model. Under current regulations, California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara specifically exempted insurance companies from disclosing the same information about the private black-box models they use to set insurance rates.
California regulations require home insurance companies to offer discounts to consumers who meet any of ten wildfire safety measures or who live in a certified wildfire safe community. The discounts however are often negligible and insurance companies can avoid them by simply choosing not to sell a customer insurance.
“Consumers must be rewarded for making their homes – and by extension our communities – safer. Insurance companies should not be allowed to continue pushing all the cost of climate change on the public,” said Balber.
