Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink is on a mission to point out that the state's current reliance on the Florida Hurricane Catastrophe Fund borders on the unrealistic and it's time to start reining in the assessments homeowners could face by shifting some of the burden back to the voluntary reinsurance market. Looking at the details, the proposal is in many ways a modest one, but it reflects the first major step towards reassessing the impact of last year's highly controversial property bill as well as potentially limiting the government's role in the marketplace. And for that reason alone it could signal a sea of change in how the legislature approaches the market in the 2008 legislative session.

From the beginning, the Cat Fund was destined to play a central role when Governor Charlie Crist and the legislature set the goal of lowering homeowners' rates, which had significantly increased following the 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons. The only realistic way to drive down rates was to increase the availability of affordable reinsurance to provide insurers with a viable financial base. Lawmakers certainly met that goal when they basically doubled the Cat Fund's single-season capacity from $16 billion to $28 billion. And they wanted to make sure the premium savings has been passed on to policyholders.

The degree of success is a matter of opinion, with the legislature and regulators decidedly coming down on the side that insurers haven't delivered on the promised rate cuts. Under last year's property bill, insurers were required to submit a filing to reflect the estimated savings from the bill. Then they had to make a second "true-up" filing once they completed putting their reinsurance programs in place.