Rising insurance costs

Everything is up. Groceries, gas, the mortgage, the insurance bill. Most of that is not a city council’s to fix, and I am not going to stand here and tell you otherwise. Insurance is the exception.

It is also worse than a rate increase for some people. Premiums are climbing and neighbors are being told they will not be renewed at all, which is a different kind of bad morning. Portions of Rancho Santa Margarita sit inside Very High, High and Moderate fire hazard severity zones on the state’s 2025 maps. That is the ground we are standing on, and it is not going to change by itself.

The state has a program, and it is worth knowing about. California’s Safer from Wildfires rules require an insurer that prices wildfire risk to account for mitigation, including two community designations. Rancho Santa Margarita holds one of them, the Fire Risk Reduction Community designation, as of June 2026. The people who earned that are the Orange County Fire Authority, RSM CERT, the Firewise neighborhoods and the residents who show up to cut brush. Filed credits run to up to 20% off the wildfire portion of a premium.

And the bill still went up. That is not a complaint about anybody, it is arithmetic: a credit against one component of a premium, claimed one household at a time, was never going to meet the size of this problem. The research is blunt about it — the cost of hardening a house runs well ahead of what the discount gives back. Filing for a designation is paperwork. It does not cut a single acre of brush.

Two things decide this, and the second one is the one people are frightened of: the base rate carriers set for this city, and whether they will keep writing here at all. A non-renewal letter is a worse morning than a rate increase, and plenty of people in this city have had one. Both come down to how risky the place genuinely is. The models look at roughly a quarter-mile around a home — the slope, the fuel, the access, the edge where the neighborhood meets open country. Almost none of that is inside any homeowner’s fence. It is city land, SAMLARC common area and the wildland boundary, which makes it exactly the work a council is responsible for.

So the job is not to chase a discount. It is to de-risk this city until an insurance company feels safe writing here — measurably harder to burn, and able to prove it — and then to sit down with the carriers and the fire service and make sure the price reflects it. Rancho Palos Verdes already does part of this: the city writes its residents a letter setting out the mitigation it and the county fire department perform, and residents hand it to their insurer. We can do that here within a month, and then keep going.

There is also a list nobody is reading. Under the state’s rating rules an insurer has to tell you, in writing and within fifteen days of an application, where your property ranks, why, and what would improve it — and give you a way to appeal. Every one of those letters is an instruction from the people who set the price. Collect enough of them and you no longer have to guess what would move the needle for this city. You have it in writing, from the carriers themselves.

And underneath all of it is the part that is not about money. I would want the fuel cut back and the edges cleared if insurance were free. A lower premium is what it looks like from the outside when a place has genuinely made itself safer. That is the order those two things go in, and I would not sell it the other way around.