When in doubt, give Citizens’ staffers huge raises while Floridians are unemployed | Editorial

In a tasteless, tacky display of tone-deafness, Citizens Property Insurance CEO Barry Gilway just dropped $159,000 in pay raises on a handful of favored folks in his executive suite.

The departure of an employee earning a $374,000 — that’s not a typo — afforded Gilway the chance to rethink his organizational chart.

But rather than ask the leadership team to do more with less, Gilway rewrote some job descriptions and handed out hefty pay raises, rubber-stamped by his compliant board. Only former Lieutenant Gov. Carlos Lopez-Cantera objected, according to Politico, on the grounds that pay raises were inappropriate when more than a million people have just lost their jobs. He further recommended that the positions be publicly advertised.

Lopez-Cantera was right on both counts. But his fellow board members did — as is their custom — whatever Gilway told them to do. This is familiar territory for Citizens. Not that long ago, Gilway’s annual salary skyrocketed to $550,000 as Citizens was offloading hundreds of thousands of policies. He was making more than four times as much as the governor’s salary at the time.

Citizens was birthed by the Legislature in 2002 “as a not-for-profit, tax-exempt, government entity” charged with providing insurance protection to Floridians who are unable to find property insurance coverage in the private market. Operated by a board of political appointees, its only source of revenue is from the insurance premiums policyholders pay.

Citizens’ website boasts of the agency’s “Sound Judgment: In every situation, we strive to do the right thing.” That claim has been challenged over the years by customers and investigative reporters, but Gilway has never wavered from his belief that he and his team deserve private-sector pay, even if they do work for a “government entity,” even when that government has its back to the wall — and even when so many of its people are suffering.