of the elected and appointed ….
of the elected and appointed insurance commissioners across the country — eventually came on board.
The state is also planning to participate in the next NAIC data call, but data from that likely won’t be usable until June, said Trevor Graff, the director of government relations with the Securities and Insurance office.
“I’m hoping we can focus on the fact that we are participating in the data call, and we will mitigate the prior administration’s non-participation in that action,” Graff said.
Wildfires are also a continual concern and according to the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies, the number of billion-dollar disasters is expected to increase by about 50 percent by the end of the decade. Montana has been impacted by at least one billion-dollar disaster annually. “By the end of this decade, it is likely Montana will have experienced 16 or more billion-dollar disasters in just 10 years,” a presentation during Tuesday’s committee meeting stated.
Fires and what to do about them have been a long-running discussion and late last year one of the panelists, Kimi Barrett, a lead wildfire research and policy analyst at Headwaters Economics, helped author a report on the issue.
“If the homes are part of this problem, they must fundamentally be part of the solution, and in the most simplest form, by reducing risk proactively, before the wildfire becomes the disaster is our best chance at long term insurance retainment,” Barrett said Tuesday.
Ler, who spent time working fires with the Department of Natural Resources and Conservation and then more than a decade as a volunteer firefighter, said it’s a concern – and will take federal fire mitigation action. Exactly what type of (and how much) mitigation is needed is a point of contention among some environmentalists, with some researchers saying the forests are not as overgrown as many think.
Even so, there has been a push to do more mitigation work, which can be expensive.
“For us to see real reduction and real risk reduction in the state of Montana, we have to charge the federal government with actually taking care of the lands that they, in a sense, own or have control over, because without that, we’re never going to see a real reduction,” Ler said. “We can have all the mitigation plans in place on your private property, but when you have a fire coming down at you at 60 mph, there’s absolutely nothing you can do, and the houses are going to burn just the same.”
