First got here the My Safe Florida Home program, offering matching grants to householders who fortify their houses towards wind harm in trade for premium reductions. Seeing the recognition and effectiveness of that program, Florida lawmakers final month launched payments to increase the trouble to incorporate grants for elevating and strengthening houses to cut back flood harm.
Now comes Florida Senate Bill 1366, permitted unanimously Tuesday by the Senate Banking and Insurance Committee, which would offer wind mitigation for condominiums close to the shoreline. The My Safe Florida Condominium Pilot Program would assist condominiums and apartment associations, which have been slammed with pricey inspections, repairs, hovering insurance coverage premiums and much-reduced protection limits within the final two years.
The fortification work might embody new home windows and doorways, stronger roof connections and secondary water limitations on roofs.
“I think this pilot program is consistent with what we’ve done here in the Legislature to get property insurance premiums under control,” stated the invoice’s sponsor, Sen. Nick DeCeglie, R-St. Petersburg.
The program, just like the My Safe Florida Home system, can be managed by the Department of Financial Services and would come with inspections by certified and screened inspectors. For each $1 offered by a apartment affiliation, this system would kick in $2 in state funding.
The invoice doesn’t present a ceiling on the dimensions of the grants — in contrast to the householders program, which caps grants at $10,000. The measure additionally doesn’t present a funding mechanism however notes that this system can be topic to “annual legislative appropriations.”
If the invoice had been to move the complete Legislature, wording in it might restrict the variety of candidates, regardless of the dire dire want for decrease insurance coverage prices. The invoice specifies that purposes for grants must be permitted by a majority of the apartment affiliation board and must move a unanimous vote of all unit homeowners within the buildings.
Such a excessive threshold may very well be tough to attain. Critics have stated that a few of the troubles going through condominiums, together with the dearth of repairs earlier than the 2021 collapse of the Champlain Towers South building close to Miami Beach that killed 98 folks, had been the results of apartment boards being unable to achieve sufficient help from unit homeowners to proceed with structural enhancements. That was modified by Florida Senate Bill 4D, the apartment reform invoice that was signed into regulation in 2022. The regulation now notes that affiliation boards might now not keep away from sure very important repairs and upgrades.
DiCeglie didn’t clarify on the committee assembly Tuesday why that unanimous-vote requirement is within the invoice.
The Banking and Insurance Committee additionally permitted one other insurance coverage invoice provided by DiCeglie. SB 1338 would offer a regulatory framework for the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation to supervise pet insurance coverage insurance policies.
The invoice is predicated on a National Association of Insurance Commissioners mannequin regulation, adopted in 7 states, DiCeglie stated. It would require disclosure by pet insurers on coverage exclusions, ready intervals, and deductibles, and would give pet homeowners the best to rescind a coverage inside 30 days of issuance.
The regulation is required because of enormous progress within the pet insurance coverage market. Some coverage premiums across the nation have exceeded the cost of medical take care of the pet; and the trade has seen an increase in advanced insurance policies with too many exclusions, the NAIC has stated.
“This is long overdue,” DiCeglie stated within the committee assembly. “OIR does not have a regulatory framework to work in and that is what this bill seeks to accomplish.”
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Florida
Politics
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