Support Senate Bills 894 and 897

Imagine everything you own is destroyed by fire — your home, your pets, your car, and every piece of furniture, clothes, jewelry, and keepsake you have. Your entire life’s possessions have gone up in flames.

Then imagine that you have to fight with the same insurance company you have faithfully paid for years, just to see it make good on the promises it made to pay for the rebuilding of your home and the replacement of your belongings.

If you are one of the 6.500 Californians who lost everything in the 2017 fires, you don’t have to imagine this. This is what you are experiencing right now, while the rest of us are just one disaster away from suffering the same circumstances —losing everything and then having to fight the insurance company.

Californians survived the fires only to face more emotional trauma, as they were required by the insurance companies to create detailed inventories before the insurers will pay for the contents of their homes, or they discovered they were underinsured and do not have enough to rebuild their homes.

This week, I stood with fire survivors in the State Capitol to ask the Senate to adopt legislation I am sponsoring that will reduce the burdens imposed on fire survivors. And make it easier to get the funds they need to recover.

Sadly but not surprisingly, the insurance companies and their high paid lobbyists are working to defeat or eviscerate our bills to help last year’s fire victims to get on with their lives.