Janelle Irwin Taylor
Rep. Nick DiCeglie will chair the Insurance and Banking subcommittee, House Speaker Chris Sprowls announced Friday along with a sweeping list of committee and leadership assignments.
The subcommittee falls under the umbrellas of the larger Commerce Committee, on which DiCeglie was also named a member.
“To the extent possible, we attempted to accommodate your preference requests,” Sprowls wrote in a memo sent to members about committee assignments.
In all, DiCeglie was named to five committees, which also includes the powerful Ways and Means Committee, the Justice Appropriations subcommittee and the Local Administration and Veterans Affairs subcommittee.
As chair of the Insurance and Banking subcommittee, DiCeglie will lead committee debate on insurance and banking regulation.
Insurance is likely to be a hot topic as members are expected to debate issues pertaining to waiving liability on businesses related to COVID-19. DiCeglie is a small business owner himself. He owns Solar Sanitation, a waste management company serving Pinellas County.
Assignment of benefits discussions are also expected to continue, as they do every year as members contemplate how insured individuals navigate the claims process.
Assignment of benefits, or AOB, allows policyholders to sign over their insurance policy benefits to a third party in exchange for quick repairs. Many times, contractors and attorneys on the other end of the AOB take insurers over inflated repair costs, goading policyholders with cash incentives to stray away from their insurers’ approved repairmen.
In 2019, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation to curb AOB litigation, but House leadership carved out auto glass repair AOBs from the final product. Now business groups, including the Florida Chamber of Commerce, are hoping to remedy the carve out.
About 40% of auto glass assignment of benefits claims have come from Hillsborough County, which neighbors DiCeglie’s north Pinellas House District 66.
Sprowls’ announcement to members provided the full committee assignment lists for 36 committees and subcommittees. He will assign the vice chair and members for the Redistricting Committee and subcommittees, responsible for redrawing district boundaries after the results of the 2020 census, as the committee’s tasks approach.
