County hears insurer view on wildfire insurance crisis; board resolves as Flood Control District to hold sessions on home hardening

Coconino County supervisors, meeting as the Flood Control District Board of Directors, voted unanimously to resolve as the Flood Control District and heard a briefing from the insurance industry on the wildfire insurance crisis confronting many county homeowners.

Ethan Amman, senior director for environmental issues and resiliency at the American Property Casualty Insurance Association (APCIA), told the board that insurers are seeing sustained underwriting losses nationally and that mitigation at both the parcel and community scale is the primary path to stabilizing availability and cost. "Ultimately, we think the best solution to address wildfire risk and ensure insurance availability and affordability lies in these robust science-based mitigation efforts at both the individual and community levels," Amman said.

The presentation placed the county's problem in national context by citing industry and regulator data showing multi-year underwriting losses, rising reconstruction costs since the COVID-19 pandemic, and greater numbers of homes located in high-risk areas. Amman said publicly available wildfire maps rank Coconino County in roughly the 90th percentile for county-level wildfire risk and Flagstaff higher than 99 percent of U.S. communities. He described the role catastrophe models play for insurers and said those models, combined with parcel-level mitigation certifications, are what allow carriers to offer coverage or price discounts.

Why it matters: board members said they are receiving calls and emails from residents whose policies were nonrenewed or whose premiums skyrocketed. County officials and the presenter repeatedly…