Waste of the Day: CA Insurance Official Travels on Taxpayers’ Dime
Topline: California held a state Senate committee hearing on March 12 to decide how to regulate property insurance in the wake of the Los Angeles fires, but one very important official was missing. Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara was on a trip to Bermuda to give a 15-minute speech.
Days later, Lara conditionally approved State Farm’s “emergency” request to raise property insurance rates by up to 38%.
Lara was also in Bermuda during a key insurance hearing last March. He has taken at least 56 work trips since taking office in 2019, costing taxpayers at least $30,972, ABC7 discovered. The dollar total is likely even higher, but “a significant chunk of the records are missing and the state has been unable to provide them,” the news station reported.
Key facts: Taxpayers spent $26,652 to fully fund 11 of Lara’s trips, including flights to Puerto Rico, Toronto and more. The public chipped in another $4,320 for Uber and hotel costs on 10 more trips that were otherwise funded by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.
ABC7 could only say for certain that taxpayers did not contribute to six of Lara’s trips. The state was unable to provide receipts for the remaining 29 trips, with destinations including Egypt, Chile, Costa Rica, Singapore, Ireland and Scotland.
The most expensive junket was a $6,022 trip to Paris to attend an economic development conference in January 2020. Second on the list was a trip to the Conference of LGBT Political Leaders of the Americas in Bogota, Colombia for $4,629 in May 2019.
From 2021 to 2022, the state Senate only held two insurance hearings. Lara was absent from both.
State Sen. Susan Rubio, chair of the Senate Insurance Committee, told ABC7 that Lara attended “many” Senate hearings over Zoom. Video recordings show that only happened once, ABC7 reported.
In May 2024, Lara went on an eight-day “legislative study tour” in the United Kingdom. He gave a “climate presentation” to the Central Bank of Uruguay the same month. One week later, taxpayers spent $892 on his four-star hotel in Honolulu for “policy training.”
Lara makes a salary of $177,393, according to records obtained by OpenTheBooks.
Search all federal, state and local government salaries and vendor spending with the AI search bot, Benjamin, at OpenTheBooks.com.
Critical quote: “I think most Californians, especially those who are currently trying to recover from the tragedies in Los Angeles, would hope the insurance commissioner would be here at home helping them recover from those tragedies, not off on a junket in Bermuda,” Carmen Barber, an executive director with Consumer Watchdog, told CBS News. “Unfortunately, this is not the first time and certainly won’t be the last that we see the commissioner off on a foreign trip in an exotic locale at a quote-unquote insurance meeting that still raises eyebrows for consumers.”
Summary: Californians are paying Lara’s salary so that he can work in California, not take expeditions across the globe.
The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com