Florida Insurance Commissioner Kevin McCarty resigns
TALLAHASSEE -- After more than a decade as Florida's top insurance regulator, Kevin McCarty resigned Tuesday, nearly a year after he survived a failed effort by Gov. Rick Scott to get rid of him.
McCarty invited reporters from the Herald/Times and two other news outlets to his office to break the news of his departure effective May 2.
McCarty, 56, is the state official who decides how much homeowners pay for their property insurance, and over the past decade he has repeatedly borne the brunt of criticism for higher rates charged to Floridians.
Appointed in 2003 following a Cabinet reorganization approved by voters, he served under three governors and helped steer the state through a series of devastating hurricanes while seeking to protect consumers, many of them elderly, from peddlers of insurance products.
McCarty shrewdly navigated the capital's perilous politics for an unusually long time, but he was viewed as vulnerable after Scott took the oath as governor for a second time one year ago this week.
Weeks after Scott engineered the removal of Gerald Bailey as the state's top law enforcement official, an action the governor later said he mishandled, Scott called for a new insurance commissioner.
Scott's office already had a replacement in mind: Ron Henderson, a Louisiana insurance official who was being promoted by Fred Karlinsky, a Tallahassee lobbyist for insurance interests and a Scott supporter.
But consumer groups rallied to McCarty's side, and in the furor following Bailey's ouster, which included public criticism of Scott by Cabinet members and a lawsuit by media outlets, another controversial personnel move by Scott became politically impossible.
McCarty earns $134,000 a year as the state's first appointed insurance commissioner and director of the state Office of Insurance Regulation. His successor must win the support of both Scott and Chief Financial Officer Jeff Atwater in a vote by the governor and Cabinet.
The next scheduled Cabinet meeting is Jan. 21.
McCarty is the last surviving high-level appointee who has served continuously since Jeb Bush was governor. Bush left office in 2003.
McCarty's departure leaves a hole in one of the most challenging jobs in state government, because of the political sensitivity surrounding the cost and availability of insurance in a state highly vulnerable to catastrophic hurricanes and ever-present insurance fraud.
"It's been a state of fraudsters and hucksters," McCarty told the Insurance Journal in a recent podcast interview.
McCarty's resignation follows the departure of another state agency head Scott wanted out, Marshall Stranburg at the Department of Revenue. Scott last year also sought to replace chief banking regulator Drew Breakspear.
This story was originally published January 5, 2016 at 7:17 PM with the headline "Florida Insurance Commissioner Kevin McCarty resigns ."