TAMPA, Fla. — A new poll out on Monday said voters are more worried about insurance than property taxes.
The University of North Florida poll showed when asked to choose between property taxes or property insurance, 63% of respondents said they are more concerned about insurance, while 36% were more concerned about taxes.
Among those, 55% said they didn’t think Florida’s insurance market is improving. That’s why this topic is heating up as election day approaches.
Tampa Bay 28 anchor Nadeen Yanes covers Florida’s insurance crisis and how residents are navigating the cost.
Yanes attended a virtual press conference where Hurricane Helene and Milton survivors from Pinellas County said Florida’s insurance market is broken.
“It's been two years and we are still not back in our home due to litigation with our insurance company. I think it isn't necessarily a Democrat versus Republican thing, I look at this being the difference between right and wrong. This is a Floridian thing,” said Brit Bloom.
Britt Bloom is one of the many who shared her story during the press conference where Democratic candidate for Governor David Jolly announced his plan to tackle insurance if elected.
Jolly already announced that he wants to create a Florida Disaster Fund, that will take the wind and hurricane risk away from insurance companies and instead have Florida cover the hurricane risk. He claims that will slash rates by up to 60-70%
But on Monday, Jolly announced if elected, he plans to take executive action when it comes to how insurance companies move around their profits and put a cap on how much money insurers can shift to their affiliates out of state by clearly defining what is a “fair and reasonable amount” of money they can move while reporting their profits and claiming losses here in the state.
"Through managing general agents, we have allowed our insurance companies to ship over a billion dollars, a billion dollars of profits received by premiums from people like Katie and Britt, ship their profits out of state and declare roughly $400 million or more in losses here. Folks, that's corrupt. That's corrupt," Jolly said at the news conference Monday.
Meanwhile, his opponent and Republican Byron Donalds is also talking insurance. His plan is to eliminate a premium surcharge paid to a state catastrophe fund he said would bring down rates 20-30%.
"If we get through this hurricane season, the Cat Fund is estimated to have somewhere between $13 and $13-and-a-half billion dollars. So why do we have a 25% kicker to a Cat Fund who statutory limit is $17 billion. My view is get rid of the kicker that will lower the premiums for everyone in the state," Donalds said at the Sunshine State Summit earlier this month.
He also wants to protect the insurance reforms passed by the state in 2022 and 2023 and create an online insurance scorecard for transparency for homeowners, supporting what state leaders have been working on for the last several years and what the current leadership said is working to bring rates down.
The state just last week said 48 companies have now filed for rate decreases since January of 2024.
