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Deal allows State Farm to keep rate hike, without scrutiny over firestorm payouts

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A brokered deal with regulators and consumer advocates will allow State Farm General to keep controversial increases in home insurance rates that took effect last year in the wake of the devastating Los Angeles wildfires.

The agreement sent to a judge late Friday cements a $530-million emergency hike in home insurance rates Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara negotiated with the insurer last summer.

“The agreement will provide financial relief to many policyholders while ensuring continued coverage for State Farm policyholders while California’s insurance market stabilizes,” the insurance department said in a news release.

State Farm argued the emergency hike was necessary because catastrophic fire losses jeopardized its financial ratings.

The company has reported that it paid out $6.2 billion in claims last year, largely from the wildfires, with most of the costs covered through reinsurance payments. The company has told regulators it anticipates to pay an additional $1 billion in claims.

The deal allows the insurer to keep an average 17% increase in homeowner rates. Local rates for many of the company’s 1 million home customers were much higher.

However, consumer advocates argued the agreement held the line on even higher increases and halted further policy cancellations that have deepened a crisis in the state’s insurance industry.

State Farm, California’s largest home insurer, froze new business in 2023, announced 72,000 mass non-renewals, and sought a series of rate hikes. Its average homeowners premium in California doubled from 2020 to 2024.

Under Friday’s agreement, State Farm agrees to forgo mass non-renewals in 2026 and undergo further review of its rates by 2027.

Additionally, State Farm will be required to return nearly two-thirds of its 15% increase to condominium owners, deliver a small refund to rental property owners and be able to raise premiums for renters a half a percent.

“This rate enables State Farm General to continue serving existing California customers,” the company said in a statement. “We will continue to monitor our capacity to support the risks we insure and maintain the financial strength needed to pay claims and support customers and communities when it matters most.”

If approved by an administrative law judge, the settlement will be forwarded to Lara, who is expected to back it.

The arrangement sidesteps efforts to tie State Farm’s rates to its handling of disaster claims.

Under pressure from community advocates and lawmakers, Lara in May had said he wanted the two issues evaluated together.

In June, Lara announced his department would conduct an “expedited” examination into State Farm’s market conduct. In rate hearing proceedings, agency staff sought to block discussion of State Farm’s claims handling in relation to its quest for premium hikes.

The pact does not directly address complaints of unhappy policyholders who say Lara’s administration has failed to hold State Farm accountable, which the insurance department has disputed.

A department spokesman said Lara would not comment on the matter while the rate settlement is before an administrative judge.

The Jan. 7, 2025, firestorm destroyed at least 16,000 homes, triggering more than 42,000 insurance claims. State Farm has said it has 13,500 fire and auto claims related to the fires.

The insurer has come under heavy criticism from fire victims over its handling of claims, including complaints of low payout offers, denials for toxin testing and delays in payments for living expenses. The company has declined to comment on the complaints.

Some 51,000 State Farm homeowners live in disaster areas struggling to recover from the L.A. firestorm. Regulatory filings show those areas among the hardest hit by the current hikes.

Malibu resident Chad Peters said his bill from State Farm increased 140% in the last year, from $3,500 to $8,400.

Peters said he has battled State Farm for 14 months over smoke and fire damage to his home from the Palisades fire, and that the insurer at one point attempted to cancel his coverage because the house remained unrepaired.

He called rate increases in such circumstances “ludicrous, while they’re giving everyone such a hard time with their insurance…I mean, mine has been a steep uphill battle all year long.”

Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez (D-Alhambra) had urged Lara to delay hikes until after the investigation into State Farm’s conduct.

“The fact that I have so many individuals who have not received any of their claims, that are still navigating denials and delays, who are actively running out of [living expense payments] and … facing housing insecurity — it makes me deeply concerned,” Pérez said.

Pérez, along with Sens. Ben Allen (D-Pacific Palisades) and Sade Elhawary (D-Los Angeles), in April pressed Lara to defer rate hikes until State Farm General’s claims practices could be investigated. “This was a big priority for us.”

Pérez said she would seek answers to the market conduct exam as part of a Senate inquiry into the insurance department’s handling of those complaints, along with scrutiny of the department’s discipline of a compliance officer who criticized State Farm’s handling of claims.

State Farm General, an offshoot of national insurance giant State Farm Mutual, contends it has been financially sinking as seasonal wildfires morph into catastrophic urban conflagrations that destroy towns.

In mid-2024, the company asked to raise home premiums by nearly $1 billion. Lara secured an agreement that State Farm Mutual lend its California affiliate $400 million, but the insurer would not agree to cancel plans for dropping 11,000 more policyholders.

The settlement allows State Farm to avoid a public hearing that would have forced the disclosure of solvency records, mass non-renewals and other information it said would help competitors.

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The justices are still struggling with whether and when to explain themselves to the public when the court issues temporary, but consequential, orders.

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NASA Starshade Would Enable Astronomers To Directly Image Rocky Exoworlds

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A NASA-led team is hoping to take a short cut in directly imaging extrasolar earthlike planets. The idea is to use what they term a hybrid telescope composed of an orbital starshade coupled with the next generation of extremely large ground-based optical telescopes.

Positioned some 175,000km away in an elliptical Earth orbit, the starshade would likely first be used in conjunction with the European Southern Observatory’s Extremely Large Telescope, now scheduled to see scientific first light in northern Chile by late 2030.

The starshade would block out the parent star’s light to enable directly imaged optical observations of nearby solar systems and rocky earth-sized worlds. That is, planetary systems all located within some twenty light years of Earth.

Dubbed the Hybrid Observatory for Earth-like Exoplanets (HOEE), the team has already applied for Phase B NIAC (NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts) funding that they hope to see granted by 2027.

Current direct imaging space instruments, such as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s Near Infrared Camera and NASA’s planned Roman Space Telescope’s Coronagraph Instrument, are unable to directly observe earth-like exoplanets, write the authors of a 2026 paper appearing in the journal Nature Astronomy.

We need to go for something that is more efficient and available now; a hybrid observatory that can observe the exoplanetary system in optical light, Vladimir Airapetian, a senior astrophysicist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and a HOEE project team member, told me in Paris.

The challenge is to block light from the star in order to reveal a planet that in optical light would be a billion times fainter than the star itself. To do that, the starshade would create an artificial eclipse to occult the parent star’s light to allow ground-based observers to receive reflected light directly from the extrasolar planet.

Dubbed an occulter, the starshade would likely feature 48 petals, each 24.5-m long, and a 50-m-diameter central disk, note the Nature Astronomy paper’s authors. The starshade would also be capable of being repositioned within six meters of accuracy, using some sort of microthrusters, most likely powered by hot hydrogen gas.

Our team proves that by deploying a starshade to cast a “perfect shadow” over Earth’s largest telescopes, HOEE can suppress stellar glare before it ever enters the atmosphere, says Airapetian.

The starshade would hover directly on the line of sight between the ground telescope and the target star, offering continuous fine alignment on the celestial target, Mather has written in a previous presentation. The concept relies on a long elliptical astro-stationary orbit to match Earth’s rotation, using chemical propulsion for station-keeping and solar electric propulsion for retargeting, Mather has noted.

HOEE’s much sharper images would also allow astronomers to see entire exoplanetary systems and to clearly separate planet images from other earth-sized planets and the host star itself. This hybrid telescope’s extreme sensitivity would in principle enable the detection of an exoearth within the first minute of observation.

HOEE would also enable a definitive path to identifying the chemical signatures of life.

Airapetian wants to find active stars that are flaring frequently enough to create extrasolar auroras on rocky planets orbiting solar-type F, G, and K stars. These would ideally be stars in their first billion years on the hydrogen-burning main sequence. The idea is to look for potential exoearths circling other sun-like stars that might have either precursors of life or primitive life.

An illustration of LHS 1815b, an ancient rocky exoplanet orbiting a star in the galactic thick disk. Image Credit: NASA

We’re going for the spectral lines from red and green auroras that would signal that the atmospheres of these planets can support nitrogen and oxygen, says Airapetian.

As for projected costs and the final design?

Airapetian says it would clock in around the billion-dollar range. And the final occulter design would likely involve an inflatable structure to keep the total launch mass under 1,500 kg. The idea is that the starshade would efficiently collapse into a standard launch vehicle’s payload, Mather has written.

The Bottom Line?

For decades, the starshade was a beautiful but “impossible” dream, says Airapetian. Today, through NASA funding, that dream is becoming a buildable reality, he says.

Sources:

Vladimir Airapetian

John Mather

Nature Astronomy

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Rollover crash in Whittier sends 10 people to the hospital

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Two cars were involved in a rollover crash that sent 10 people to the hospital in Whittier on Sunday night, authorities said.

Three of the 10 patients that the Los Angeles County Fire Department took to the hospital were in critical condition, and four had minor injuries, said Pauline McGee, a spokesperson for the department. Conditions of the remaining three patients were unknown.

McGee did not say how many of the injured were in each vehicle or what caused the crash at Telegraph Road and Biella Way.

The Fire Department was dispatched at 9:11 p.m. and arrived at the collision site four minutes later.

The department notified the local public works agency of some damage, but McGee could not say what exactly was damaged or what the extent was.

She referred questions about arrests to the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department. A spokesperson for the Sheriff’s Department redirected questions to the Norwalk Sheriff’s Station, which was not available to comment on the incident on Monday evening.