Hawaii lawmakers vow to stabilize property insurance market as climate change fuels higher premiums

HONOLULU (AP) — Hawaii lawmakers began a new legislative session Wednesday with a vow to try to stabilize the state's property insurance market as hurricanes, wildfires and other climate change-influenced disasters at home and elsewhere prompt insurance carriers to raise rates.

Hurricanes in Florida and North Carolina and wildfires in California affect the insurance business in Hawaii because insurance companies buy reinsurance — insurance for themselves — on the global market. As reinsurance rates rise in response to these disasters, some insurers want to charge more in Hawaii or stop providing insurance in the islands.

Insurance companies had increasingly been viewing Hawaii as a disaster risk state even before the August 2023 wildfires on Maui, but that event only intensified the trend, Senate President Ron Kouchi told reporters at a news conference.

The emergence of multiple large wildfires that have destroyed thousands of structures in and around Los Angeles over the past week have made matters worse. A preliminary estimate last week by AccuWeather, a private company that provides data on weather and its impact, put damage and economic losses from the fires between $135 billion and $150 billion, likely the costliest in U.S. history.

The current situation is “incredibly complicated and dynamic,” said state Sen. Jarrett Keohokalole, chair of the Senate Commerce and Consumer Protection Committee.

“We don’t have any certainty, for example, on what the fires in Los Angeles are going to cause in the insurance market, in part because the fires are not even extinguished yet,” he said.

“It’s unclear at this point whether we’re at the bottom or things could get worse,” the Democrat said. “What we can expect is that these larger and larger scale disasters are going to continue to increase in frequency, and we need to be prepared for it.”

Senate Democrats will propose restarting programs started after Hurricane Iniki hit Kauai in 1992 and upended property insurance for years after. At the time, the state created a fund to provide hurricane insurance to residents.

The Hawaii Hurricane Relief Fund created after Iniki provided hurricane coverage to 155,000 policyholders statewide for a decade until private insurers returned to the market. The state paid for the fund through policyholder premiums, assessments on licensed property and casualty insurers, a special mortgage recording fee and a surcharge on premiums on policies issued by licensed property and casualty insurers.

The state authorized the director of finance to issue bonds to help the fund operate, but they were never issued.

Keohokalole said the state has limited resources and he couldn't guarantee that such a program would lead to prices that homeowners are accustomed to. It's important for Hawaii homeowners to be able to buy insurance locally, he said.

“We can’t expect kupuna on fixed incomes or families that are struggling right now to be able to pay whatever the market dictates globally, when Hawaii is a tsunami risk state, a wildfire risk state and a hurricane risk state,” he said, using the Hawaiian word for elders.

Longer term, he said lawmakers would need to discuss resiliency and fire safety measures homeowners can adopt so they'll be better able to withstand disasters.

Hawaii condominium owners have been hit particularly hard by insurance market instability.

Testifiers before the Legislature last year said condo boards were increasingly choosing to reduce the amount of their insurance coverage because they couldn’t afford higher premiums. But Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which buy home loans from banks and other lenders, will only buy mortgages for units in buildings insured up to full replacement value. This makes banks unwilling to lend money to buyers of these condos.

One testifier said between 375 to 390 condominium buildings in Hawaii were underinsured for hurricane risk.

Keohokalole said it was imperative that lawmakers “deliver something” this session, which ends in May.

Kouchi, also a Democrat, noted that without insurance people wouldn't be able to get a mortgage and would have to pay cash to buy a home. He said this would be a “tremendous impediment” to homeownership in a state where the median price of a single-family home is over $1 million in most counties.

The Los Angeles wildfires are also testing California's insurance market, where major insurers have pulled back on property coverage as climate change makes wildfires, floods and windstorms more common and damaging.