Association Board President’s Message—January 28, 2025

Welcome everyone to the January 2025 Association Board of Directors meeting and Happy New Year.

Wildfire and politics are the two topics that are on the news and on our minds. We don’t really talk politics here so let’s talk wildfire—and insurance. Yes, insurance is also on the minds of a few of us around here.

Wildfire is and isn’t in our control. We can do our best to prevent it with our fire hardening and landscape changes but we can never be 100% safe from wildfire. But we can try to become as safe as we can. I hope you have all seen The Villager and have noticed the hard work that Deb Gordon, Mary Tatum and all the Firewise staff and volunteers have done to obtain for all of us the distinction of being named a Firewise USA Community. The work is not done. We have the Carol Rice reports from each community indicating what should be done to make us even safer. It is up to our individual DACs to pick and choose their priorities during the ongoing budgeting process. We need to continue to build upon what has been done to make us safer each and every year. I commend all the work that has been done but we cannot rest on our accomplishments, we must continue to improve things each year. Rosemary and juniper are still present in The Villages, so we are not done.

Just before Thanksgiving we had our initial meeting with our insurance brokers about the 2025 renewal.  They indicated that the insurance market had leveled out and as long as there were no major catastrophes our insurance premium should have a modest rise between 5 and 10%. When the wildfires in Los Angeles hit the news I thought our insurance was going to go through the roof. There is no way the largest insurance claim ever in the state of California was going to happen without us getting hit hard.  However, we met with our insurance brokers again last week and they told us that because of where we buy our insurance, the market has not changed and we can still expect the 5 to 10% increase. They cannot guarantee that but they are the ones with their fingers on the pulse of the market so we hope they are correct. We will know within the next month as we approach our renewal date.

Our insurance committee continues to meet every two weeks and continues to investigate every avenue to try to keep our rates down and our coverage high. I again want to thank David Cook, David Dimmick, Jeanette Campa and Bob Fillhouer for the work they put in to make sure we stay on top of this issue. It is important to our financial well-being, and while we know this year is a relatively easy year as far as renewals go, next year is going to be a much more difficult situation to deal with.  

—Association Board President Michael Schwerin