Borrowed Time

Sometime soon — maybe even this year — the run of good luck that has brought Florida five consecutive hurricane-free years will end. When it does, the state could face a fiscal crisis that would make this year's $3.6 billion budget gap appear trivial.

If legislators do not quickly enact reforms that cut the size of the Florida Citizens Property Insurance Corp., reform the state's Hurricane Catastrophe Fund and improve the safety of the state's built environment, quite simply, they will not have done their job.

The facts about Citizens and the Cat Fund show just how serious the situation has become. Rather than leaving the risk to private insurance companies, Citizens, a state agency that sells property insurance to about a quarter of all Floridians, could force taxpayers to pay billions for damage to homes all across the state. And the state-run Hurricane Catastrophe Fund, which sells discount-rate reinsurance (insurance for insurance companies) to Citizens and all of the state's private insurers, is an even worse mess. It has about $6 billion in hard assets to pay for claims that, in a particularly bad year, could theoretically top $24 billion.