Insurance commissioner candidates address storm damage

By Jaymie Baxley 

In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene’s deadly lurch through western North Carolina, the oft-overlooked race for commissioner of insurance is likely to be one of the more closely watched contests in November’s election. 

An untold number of homes and businesses were damaged or destroyed by the storm, with insurance industry estimates projecting tens of billions of dollars in losses. The state insurance commissioner is responsible for ensuring that victims’ claims are handled promptly and fairly, giving the office considerable influence over the region’s recovery.

Incumbent Commissioner Mike Causey, a 74-year-old Guilford County resident who once ran his own insurance business, became the first Republican elected to the seat in 2017. His Democratic challenger is current state Sen. Natasha Marcus, a 55-year-old attorney from Mecklenburg County who has represented District 41 since 2019.

Helene has moved to the forefront of both candidates’ campaigns in recent days, and it was the opening topic during their first — and only scheduled — public forum, held Tuesday evening at Caffe Luna in Raleigh. 

Organized by the N.C. Justice Center, the forum started with a question — asking Causey and Marcus what the insurance commissioner’s “top priority should be in responding to people’s needs” in storm-ravaged parts of the state. 

‘Truly devastating’

Causey, who had traveled earlier that day to western North Carolina to survey the damage, began his response by describing the conditions in Old Fort. The small McDowell County town, he said, “looks like a war zone.”

“The town of Old Fort and all of western North Carolina depends on the railroad, and the railroad from Old Fort to Asheville is gone,” he said. “I mean, it is literally gone. The tracks washed away. It is truly devastating.”

Causey noted that agents from the Department of Insurance‘s Criminal Investigation Division began “going door-to-door” to assist residents in McDowell County ahead of Helene’s arrival. They were able to evacuate 144 homes last Thursday, he said.

“Not a single life has been lost in McDowell, but we’ve lost a lot of lives in Buncombe and some of the other counties,” Causey said. “This is a disaster of epic proportions, and we all have to come together, as the governor said this morning, to work as a team.”

At least 73 storm-related deaths had been confirmed in North Carolina as of late Wednesday. Sixty-one of those deaths are linked to Buncombe County, according to The Asheville Citizen Times. 

While Causey did not directly identify a “top priority” in his response, he has said the Department of Insurance “will be coordinating on ways to reach those on the ground with insurance claims and other needs in the coming days and weeks.” The department has announced the opening of victim assistance centers that will provide insurance-related support to residents in Gaston and Wilkes counties. 

Climate concerns 

Similar to Causey, Marcus began her response by acknowledging the storm’s “devastating” toll on western North Carolina.

“I think we’re all just really in a state of shock about how very bad it is out there,” she said, adding that the head of the Asheville Fire Fighters Association had told her about a body that was recovered from “a tree, 30 feet in the air” on Tuesday. “That’s how bad it is.”

Marcus said the growing frequency and ferocity of major storms like Helene show “how glaringly obvious it is that climate change is real.”

“We ought to admit it and talk about it and tackle it,” she said. “You can’t just react and say, ‘Oh, well, that was a bad storm,’ and clean up from it and go on like the climate isn’t changing. One of the frustrations that I have with my opponent and his party is their refusal to admit that.”

North Carolina, she continued, is “particularly vulnerable” to catastrophic storms because of the state’s “long coastline” and abundance of “low-lying land.”

“Now we’re seeing flooding happening in the mountains, too, and too many people don’t have flood insurance,” she said. “I’m very concerned about how many people are going to realize, after they hopefully come out of it alive, that there is no money there to cover their rebuilding costs.” 

Less than 1 percent of households in the state’s worst-hit counties have flood insurance, according to reporting by Politico. 

“We have to expand. We have to encourage more people to get flood insurance. We have to do better with the flood mapping,” Marcus said. “The data we have is outdated, so a lot of people, even if they were trying to do what’s right, wouldn’t know they were in a flood zone because the data is so old. Asheville’s map is from 2010.”

Numbers released Wednesday by the N.C. State Board of Elections show that 1.2 million residents are registered to vote in the 25 counties that make up the state’s designated “disaster area.” About 37.6 percent of those voters are registered as Republicans, 22.9 percent are Democrats and 38.4 are unaffiliated. 

Affected by Helene or wanting to help people who were? NC Health News has compiled a list of resources.