Disaster insurance settlement bill heads to governor

By PETER WONG
Oregon Capital Bureau

Gov. Tina Kotek is the final stop for legislation that would allow partial settlements as an alternative when personal belongings are lost in a major disaster.

House Bill 2982 won final legislative approval Wednesday, May 3, on a 42-17 vote of the Oregon House. The bill was changed in the Senate, which passed it the previous day, to limit its scope to residential property and clarify disclosure of how insurance companies calculate depreciation, the loss of value of belongings over time.

It allows disaster survivors to settle with insurance companies for 70% of their coverage for personal belongings, as an alternative to completing detailed inventory forms for a settlement. If survivors do complete such forms, the bill would require insurance payouts within 30 days.

It applies to people affected by a “major disaster,” defined as when the governor declares a state of emergency for an event that results in loss of life, injury to people and damage to property, and human suffering and financial loss.

The bill emerged from the 2020 Labor Day wildfires that swept Oregon. One of them, known as the Almeda fire, swept through the Southern Oregon communities of Phoenix and Talent and resulted in the loss of an estimated 2,500 homes – the single largest loss of 4,000 total statewide.

The area is within the district of Rep. Pam Marsh, D-Ashland, who has sponsored related legislation in the aftermath of the wildfires.

“People found it overwhelming to try to do what insurance companies in some cases asked them to do, which was to fill in pages and pages of inventory forms in order to get payments for personal property. It was traumatizing and stressful,” Marsh said in a brief interview after the vote.

“What we want to do is just make it simpler. If you need to take your money and go live your life, you can settle for 70% of your personal property coverage – period. If you want 100%, you are still going to have to fill in the forms. But we wanted to provide some relief to people who cannot abide by the requirements that are otherwise forced upon them.”

In a press release after the vote, Marsh said many survivors were compelled to relive their trauma in the process of accounting for their losses:

“Some items like couches, bedding, or kitchen appliances could be replaced. But others, including childhood mementos and family heirlooms, were gone forever. Every item remembered and then listed on an official form brought home the excruciating nature of the loss.”

Marsh said during the House debate that some insurance companies, in the aftermath of the Almeda wildfire, chose voluntarily to offer such lump-sum payments at between 75% and 100%.

“What we are doing in this bill is to ensure that companies that did not adopt that kind of supportive policy offer that option as a percentage of coverage,” she said.

All the votes against it came from Republicans, although the amended bill won a few more votes than the original, which passed the House on a 38-21 vote back on April 3. The Senate passed the revised version Tuesday, May 2, on a 16-12 vote along party lines.

“I believe this could raise rates,” said Rep. Shelly Boshart Davis of Albany. “Either way, the consumer loses.”

But Rep. Paul Evans, D-Monmouth, said: “We are monitoring insurance companies’ performance to make sure they don’t play games with this.”