Garden State? Don't Tell The NAIC That

By E.E. Mazier

NU Online News Service, July 29, 1:48 p.m. EST?Never mind that its called the Garden State, has 9,500 farms and more than 1.1 million acres of Pine Barrens forest--in the cold actuarial view of the nation's insurance regulators, New Jersey is "entirely urban."

The National Association of Insurance Commissioners provided this turnpike-vision view in its latest report on private passenger automobile average expenditure trends.

A footnote with the report states that "the District of Columbia and New Jersey are entirely urban and their results cannot be directly compared to the results of states with rural areas."

The report was prepared by the NAIC Statistical Information Task Force, headed by Ohio Insurance Director Lee Covington, whose spokesman Todd Boyer said he was pretty sure Mr. Covington had been to New Jersey. Mr. Boyer said as a lad he had been to visit at relatives' New Jersey farmhouse and found it quite rural.

He explained that NAIC used the description based on the 1990 U.S. Census that describes 100 percent of the state population living in a metropolitan area.

"I don't know how the census defines a metropolitan area," he confessed.

New Jersey "gets a bad rap," complained Greg Romano, executive director of the State Agriculture Development Committee. Mr. Romano said the state has 1.2 million acres assessed as farmland and is "clearly not entirely urban."

Mr. Boyer said besides Mr. Covington, the task force preparing the report had included the regulator at the time from New Jersey, Superintendent Karen Suter.

Mary Caffrey, a spokeswoman for the present superintendent Holly Bakke, didn't sound unhappy with the urban designation. It is, she said, "helpful in explaining why our average premium is relatively high."

Another footnote with the report said that "Historically, New Jersey has paid 2 to 3 times the national average in dividends, which reduces the average expenditure and average premiums paid by New Jersey policyholders."

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Garden State? Don't Tell The NAIC That

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