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From: Lila Hayes
Sent: Wednesday, March 02, 2005 11:49 AM
To: info@oldfirerecoverygroup.org
Subject: OFRG weekly update
A big thanks
to the city and county building department for a very successful meeting this
past week. Visitors included:
As a reminder our next meeting will be March
13. Our speaker will be George Kehrer from Community Assisting Recovery (CARe).
Also Paul VanDyke, Chief of Staff for Senator Nell Soto, will be visiting our
meeting to talk briefly on the new bill that was introduced. Here is a
brief rundown on the legislation and a link so you can read the entire
text.
SB 477 (Soto)
This
bill would require the office to establish a process with guidelines to be
followed in order for a community to recover from an emergency or disaster and
require that process to designate the office as the coordinator of the community
recovery process until each local agency in a community determines that the
office's assistance is no longer needed, provide training, require the office to
be onsite as soon as practicable after an emergency or natural disaster occurs,
require the office to coordinate the use of temporary services, authorize the
office to coordinate the establishment of temporary structures, including local
assistance centers, showers and bathroom facilities, and temporary
administrative offices, and require the office to encourage the participation of
nongovernmental organizations in the community recovery process to supplement
recovery activities undertaken by federal or local agencies.
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Tax Information
Tax season is here and I want to remind everyone
that we do have tax handouts from last years tax seminar. It was put on by
disaster tax specialist Anna Maria Galdieri. I have re-typed the handout
and posted it to our website. You can download it HERE:
I Only have 3 DVD's left of the Tax Meeting we
had in San Bernardino last September (and my DVD burner is on the fritz), but
Community Partners had the Lake Arrowhead meeting filmed and has copies ready
right now. Contact Oscar Madrigal at omadrigal@communitypartners.org or
call him at 213-439-9640 x23.
We also have a couple of other links available on
our website regarding income tax issues. Go to www.oldfirerecoverygroup.org and
click on "Resources" then on "Professional Issues". Tax issues is at the
bottom of the page.
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Is the City Pumping Pools?
At our last meeting a question came up from a
homeowner who lost their house, but the pool is still there. Because of
the rains, they have been coming back regularly to make sure the pool is kept
empty, but recently it looked like someone had been working on the pool besides
themselves. One day they came out to find someone actually draining the
pool. The homeowner tried to get the person's name and/or phone number,
but they wouldn't give it to them and the homeowner finally made them
leave.
Peggi Hazlett of the San Bernardino Mayor's office
said that she had heard similar stories. Some homeowners had been even led
to believe that the local government had hired these people to keep the pools
empty because it was a "health concern". Because the city had actually
drained pools right after the fire, some homeowners actually believed that these
people were legitimate. Other homeowners realized otherwise only after
personal property started disappearing from their property and
they started making phone calls to verify the company's
story.
Peggi made it very clear that no part of the
city government has authorized anyone to do any such cleaning or draining of
pools. She has even called the county and the people she talked to at the
county said the same thing. They are NOT draining pools.
Do not let anyone come on your property unless you
have previously authorized them to do so and you have had time to check their
credentials and can get information from them in writing. If you do find
people on your property get as much information from them as possible.
Someone at our meeting even suggested calling 911.
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In the news
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Insurers win round against Garamendi
By Dale
Kasler -- Bee Staff Writer
Published 2:15 am PST Tuesday, March 1, 2005
Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi lost another round Monday in
his
long-running dispute with the industry over his attempt to
regulate
homeowners' coverage.
The Court of Appeal upheld a lower-court ruling that said
Garamendi
exceeded his authority by putting limits on the industry's ability
to
cancel or fail to renew insurance for homeowners who've filed a
claim.
In 2003, Garamendi saw increasing complaints
from consumers who said
their homeowners' policies were canceled or not
renewed because they'd
filed a claim. Garamendi was concerned that insurers
were scrapping
basic underwriting fundamentals about risk and relying instead
on
industry databases that list policyholder claims.
He first issued an advisory notice to insurers warning against
using
the existence of a claim to cancel or not renew a homeowner,
a
practice known as "use it and lose it." He then issued a set of
formal
guidelines on the matter.
Three insurance trade organizations
sued the commissioner, and won. On
Monday they won again.
"He has
overstepped his bounds," said Jerry Davies, spokesman for the
Personal
Insurance Federation of California, one of the three trade
groups. "A company
needs to have control of its underwriting book."
Davies also said
Garamendi was exaggerating the extent to which
companies were dropping
policyholders. "Less than one-half of 1
percent of people are nonrenewed," he
said.
In its ruling, the appeals court said state law gives the
commissioner
very little power to regulate homeowners' insurance. It said
its
ruling was based on the legality of Garamendi's move, "not its wisdom."
Norman Williams, a spokesman for Garamendi, wouldn't comment on
the
ruling, but he said the commissioner was reacting to a wave
of
consumer complaints in 2003.
"People were afraid that if they
filed one claim, they would face
nonrenewal or cancellation," Williams said.
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