The Mississippi insurance commissioner is going it alone in filing a lawsuit aimed at delaying the onset of flood insurance rate hikes after the state attorney general declined to represent him.
The premiums are scheduled to go into effect Oct. 1.
"We are moving ahead with our suit plans," commissioner Mike Chaney said last night after disclosing that AG Jim Hood had declined Tuesday to file the suit on Chaney's behalf.
In the letter, Chaney disclosed that the suit will be filed against the U.S. Government and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which administers the National Flood Insurance Program.
Chaney said in the letter that insurance premiums imposed under the Biggert-Waters Act of 2012 "significantly changes the NFIP."
Hood could not immediately be reached for comment. The letter from Chaney to Hood was sent late yesterday.
The letter also asks Hood to approve Chaney's decision to hire a private law firm to represent the insurance commissioner, an elected office in Mississippi, in the lawsuit.
He plans to file a lawsuit seeking an injunction against the rate hikes before bills start going sent out Oct. 1.
Residents of states from Texas to Vermont are protesting the increases. A group representing New Orleans businesses says some NFIP customers could see rate hikes of up to 3,000 percent.
That's because some rates have been grandfathered since flood maps setting rates based on risks were initiated under the NFIP starting in 1969. Louisiana officials said that, currently, 49 percent of flood insurance rates levied in the state are subsidized.
Jackson County, Miss., supervisors said Monday that the rate hikes imposed through the 2012 law will range from hundreds of dollars a year to thousands of dollars a year on homes in flood-prone areas and could cause people in middle- to low-income brackets to walk away from their homes.
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