New Louisiana Legislature Doing Homework on Insurance, Lobbyist Says

About 55 percent of the lawmakers in the 2008 Louisiana Legislature are new to the job but they are doing their homework on insurance issues, one surplus lines insurance industry representative says.

David Tatman of Baton Rouge-based The Tatman Group represents the Louisiana Surplus Lines Association (LSLA) on legislative issues. He says he’s excited about the new legislature created by term limits that came into effect during the last election cycle. “I expected there would be about a 60 percent turnover in the legislature, Tatman told attendees at the LSLA’s annual convention. “The turnover was actually 55 percent. … Of the 105 members of the House of Representatives, 60 of them are new.”

Tatman said he is enthused about the House of Representatives Insurance Committee. “It’s a lot smaller, there are 10 people on it and it is exciting,” he said. “Because it is a debate about data and information; they talk about issues. There have been four house insurance committee meetings. … Whenever they got into any debate at all it was about data, it wasn’t about politics.”

He said during a recent debate on a bill that would have required Citizens Property Insurance Corp., the state-backed insurer of last resort, to remove the 10 percent surcharge on all parishes south of I-10, it was obvious that the committee members had done their homework.

“They called agents in the area; they wanted to know what kind of impact it was going to have. They called people to find out who was writing in those areas because [the bill’s author] Sam Jones made the assertion that no companies were writing in his parish of St. Mary. Two legislators had actually called people and were able to name companies that were writing in St. Mary’s.

“That’s unheard of,” Tatman said. “That wouldn’t have happened before. We could have brought [the information] to them, but they really were doing their homework.”

The bill subsequently died in committee.

Tatman said only about 1,800 bills had been filed for this year’s regular legislative session, which convened March 31. “That’s extremely low,” he said. “Usually in the regular session of the legislature you have somewhere around 3,500 bills filed, you’re looking at about half.”

Tatman attributed the low bill count “to a couple of things. One is we have new legislators who don’t know the art of filing bills. You file one on the Senate side; you file one on the House side. You file one on the Senate side that kind of looks like it in case you have trouble with the first one. … But I also attribute it to the fact that a lot of new legislators are not trying to go out and do 15 different things.”