Tom Torres, director of the Arizona Department of Forestry and Fire Management, told the county board on Tuesday that insurance pressures in wildfire-prone areas are the result of multiple factors — rising construction costs, catastrophic losses nationwide, reinsurance market shifts — and that hard data are needed to craft solutions.

"One of the fundamental requirements of the new insurance review task force law is to get hard data," Torres said. He described HB2054, which establishes the insurance review task force and requires insurers to report policy and premium information annually to the state direction of DiFi; DFFM will then use a publicly available model (wildfirerisk.org) to delineate areas of "heightened fire risk." The law directs insurers to provide aggregated, de-identified data to support policy decisions.

Torres said the task force will include fire chiefs, building and code officials and insurance representatives and will examine trends in cancellations, nonrenewals and rates while recommending actions on building codes, defensible space and other mitigations. "We learned that 90% of homes that ignite in a wildfire are total losses and insurers are increasingly focused on whether a structure is likely to ignite," he said.

Board members asked how counties and residents can engage; Torres urged local input and said two legislative priorities are a more secure wildfire suppression fund and statute modernization for the State Fire Marshal's office to align codes with risk reduction strategies. He also described federal advocacy to sustain mitigation funding.

What's next: Torres said the task force will begin work after the new year and that DFFM will provide more information about the geographic delineations the agency will use under the law.