Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ Focus on Florida’s Future 2024-2025 budget invests millions in the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation (OIR) to bolster residential housing mitigation programs in the state.
The OIR has primary responsibility for regulating, complying with, and enforcing statutes related to the business of insurance and monitoring industrial markets.
The budget is to invest more than $237 million to support and strengthen Florida’s residential housing mitigation programs.
This figure includes $1.1 million to increase OIR’s ability to curate data related to Florida’s property insurance market. Plus $475,000 to hire a reinsurance expert to analyze reinsurance cycles and how they are impacting property insurance rates.
To expand the Bureau’s ability to review submissions and recommend new tools to mitigate hurricane properties, the budget has also allocated $675,000 to hire independent experts in reinsurance and mitigation research.
$200,000 will be used to research and identify additional mitigation measures that provide consumers with discounts on their homeowners insurance premium.
While $500,000 has been allocated to study the impact of substantial improvement periods on community rating system discounts and insurance rates as calculated by FEMA and local Florida floodplain managers.
The budget also provides an additional $6 million increase for Florida International University to update and enhance the capabilities of the Florida Public Hurricane Loss Model to improve geographic assessments and include hazards not currently accounted for in the model.
Insurance Commissioner Michael Yaworsky has expressed support for DeStantis’ Focus on Florida’s Future 2024-2025 budget. He commented: “Governor DeSantis’ budget strengthens the ability of the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation (OIR) to protect consumers and foster a marketplace where insurance products are reliable, available and affordable for Floridians.
“OIR is a national leader in identifying market trends and taking bold action because we collect more data about our insurance market than any other state or regulatory entity. Expanding our research and data collection capabilities will allow us to better understand the factors affecting our market so we can make data-driven decisions to ensure Floridians benefit from a stable and competitive insurance market. I thank Governor DeSantis for his leadership and continued commitment to Florida policyholders.”
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