Credit: Insurance Journal, June 26, 2025
Citizens Board of Governors met on June 25 and voted to move ahead with the full, 15% average rate increase for personal lines in 2026.
The original glide path allowed for a maximum 10% annual increase. As a result of SB 76 passed during the 2021 legislative session the cap was gradually increased by 1% per year, reaching 11% in 2022, 12% in 2023, 13% in 2024, 14% in 2025, and 15% in 2026 and subsequent years.
However two members of the Citizens Board of Governors–Robert Spottswood and Charles Lydeker–voted against the recommendation.
“We can no longer afford to increase insurance rates,” said Spottswood, a Florida Keys real estate developer. “There are property owners that are passing on insurance because it’s too expensive. There are commercial properties that can’t afford it. There are affordable housing communities that are not sustainable because of insurance costs. So somehow, we’ve got to move insurance rates in the other direction.”
Lydeker opposed the planned rate increase citing concerns about recent news of large profits for a few insurers and compensation packages for their executives.
“When I see somebody take a salary at one of the carriers of $50 million, that says to me, for the first time, because we’ve been in crisis mode, that maybe we’re not thinking about this right,” said Lydecker, CEO of Foundation Risk Partners, an insurance brokerage and consulting firm in Ormond Beach.
Lydecker was apparently referring to recent revelations that Tampa-based Slide Insurance Co. , which went public on the Nasdaq stock exchange last week, had paid founder and CEO Bruce Lucas more than $21million last year in salary, bonuses and stock awards. Slide paid Lucas’ wife, the chief operating officer, another $ 1 6. 5 million.
Lydecker argued it is perhaps time for a new model if the Florida market, just a few years past a full-blown crisis and multiple carrier insolvencies, can now afford to pay massive compensation amounts to executives.
“When someone can take $50 million out, there’s something else going on there,” Lydecker said. “Why are we, as a taxpayer-supported entity, playing that game?”
Either the state is not defining “actuarially sound” correctly, or “we’re playing a fool’s game of trying to be a true market of last resort,” he said. It may be time to have a conversation with state regulators about the Citizens- model and statutory constraints, he added.
Citizens CEO Tim Cerio said at the meeting that Lydecker raised valid concerns.