Letters to the Editor
Letter to the Editor | Chief Doan fighting for fair insurance rates
We are writing this letter to recommend some public acknowledgement of the tremendous work Chief Dennis Doan of Gig Harbor Fire & Medic One has been doing not only for the residents of his fire district, but also for all the residents living in the state of Washington.
The Washington Survey & Ratings Bureau (“WSRB”) assesses fire risks for every parcel of land in Washington. Their clients and their sole source of funding are insurance companies who use the WSRB ratings to set their homeowners premiums. Chief Doan has taken on the entrenched WSRB on our behalf, and we need to recognize and thank him for his tireless efforts. Chief Doan has been fighting the WSRB both to reduce our fire risk ratings and to ensure those ratings are applied fairly for all of us. Chief Doan’s efforts have already achieved fire risk rating reductions for many of us, but that’s not all he’s achieved.
Fire Chief Dennis Doan Photo courtesy of Gig Harbor Fire & Medic One
Chief Doan has also managed to get the Washington Office of Insurance Commissioner (OIC) involved in reviewing how the WSRB does business. He has filed well-articulated complaints against the WSRB with the OIC, and the OIC is paying attention. The OIC is seriously reviewing how the WSRB does business, how it gathers its data, and how it applies its standards to our homes.
The WSRB has operated for years as Washington’s fire risk rating entity without much, if any, oversight. Chief Doan has taken on an entrenched bureaucracy … a bureaucracy that has grown dysfunctional to the detriment of Washington residents. The WSRB’s database is full of data errors and missing data and is applied using outdated firefighting capabilities. These errors, omissions and misapplications all lead to errors in favor of the WSRB clients — the insurance companies. To compound the issue, the standards used by the WSRB are, in many instances, being applied inconsistently so that a home on one side of the street may get a higher fire risk rating than a home on the opposite side of the street.
Chief Doan is also fighting the WSRB’s demand that he use valuable and limited public safety resources to assist them in their data gathering. Chief Doan recognizes that we, the taxpayers, are not paying our taxes to support Gig Harbor Fire & Medic One’s efforts to assist the WSRB. The resources available to the Chief, as he well knows, should be on standby for fire and health emergencies at all times.
Chief Doan’s efforts have already brought the WSRB into the public eye and to the attention of the OIC. We, the residents of Gig Harbor Fire & Medic One, should thank the Chief for his tireless efforts on our behalf and we should, in some way, publicly acknowledge the tremendous job the Chief is doing for all of us.
Ron Roark
Craig McLaughlin