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Citizens reaches out - to 100 at a time
St. Petersburg Times
Tom Zucco
Tom Zucco can be reached at
zucco@sptimes.com or 727 893-8247.
7/17/2007
The property insurer takes complaints and questions, but not
many residents show up.
CLEARWATER - Maybe it was the thunderstorms. Or that word of the
forum hadn't gotten out. Or, as one Citizens Property Insurance
official guessed, maybe it was simply that most policyholders
don't have any serious problems.
Citizens insures about 238,000 homes in the Tampa Bay area,
including about 108,000 in Pinellas County. Yet only about 100
people came to the auditorium at Clearwater High School Monday
evening to ask questions and have their policies reviewed by
underwriters and executives from the state's largest property
insurer.
In
the second stop of a statewide tour to reach out to its more
than 1.3-million policyholders, officials of state-run Citizens
heard complaints that premiums have gone up and that the
replacement values of homes were unfairly inflated.
Citizens president Scott Wallace answered that the company's
rates are now competitive with the private market and that the
rates have been frozen until January 2009. As for replacement
values, officials said those can often be adjusted depending on
how much risk the homeowner wants to take on.
Many of the complaints were directed not at Citizens, but at the
insurance agents who write Citizens policies. To save money,
Citizens has no agents of its own. Instead, the company uses
nearly 8,000 agents statewide to write policies. Those agents
receive a commission ranging from 6.9 to 8.6 percent for
homeowners and about 12 percent for commercial policies.
It's that disconnect between Citizens and the agents that is
causing problems.
"I
went to three insurance agents to get a Citizens quote and got
three different rates," said Bob Cummins of Madeira Beach. "We
can't get straight answers from the agents."
Paul Palumbo, Citizens vice president of underwriting, explained
that Citizens recently began an aggressive agent training
program that should bring more consistency to rate quotes.
"You have the option to take a deductible of 2, 5 or 10
percent," Palumbo said. "And you should get mitigation credits
for the type of roof you have or for buying shutters.
"The bottom line is that if you don't get the answers you need,
call us. Or find another agent." |
