Daily Business Report-Feb. 19, 2019
California’s new law granting nonbinary gender designations has ended a car insurance break for teen girls and an upcharge for boys. (Photo: CALmatters)
What California’s ‘nonbinary’ gender
designation will cost teen drivers
By Dan Morain | CALmatters
In a little-noticed side impact of California’s 2018 law granting drivers the option of listing their gender as nonbinary, California’s Department of Insurance has decreed that auto insurance companies can no longer grant breaks in insurance rates to teen drivers who are female or charge young men more.
Outgoing Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones, in one of his final acts in office, issued a regulation last month prohibiting the use of gender in automobile insurance rating, similar to regulations in six other states.
Jones’ replacement, Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara, supports that policy, saying in a statement: “Gender, race, ethnicity or sexual orientation are beyond your control, and it is not a fair or even an effective way to predict risk.”
Jones’ regulatory action received coverage in The New York Times and elsewhere. But the genesis of Jones’ decision received far less attention—and had nothing to do with car insurance.
It was, at least in part, legislation by Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins granting motorists the option of listing their gender as male, female or nonbinary. As the bill wended its way through the Legislature, Atkins and other backers said it would be a blow for equality.
“Mindful of all the people I know who are gender-nonconforming, and the families I know with transgender children, I wanted to make sure that California continued to be a leader in gender-identity equality,” Atkins said after Gov. Jerry Brown signed it into law in October.
Lobbyists for insurance companies had been neutral on the bill, having received assurances that it would have no impact on auto insurance rates.
Rex Frazier, president of the Personal Insurance Federation of California, which represents several major auto insurance companies, said insurers were blindsided by Jones’ justification for the regulation, pointing out that none of the 10 legislative analyses of the Atkins bill made any mention of the bill’s impact on insurance rates.
“It is commonly understood that teenage male drivers are generally a higher risk than teenage female drivers,” Frazier said in a letter to the Department of Insurance. “Eliminating gender rating would require female teenage drivers to subsidize teenage male drivers.”
Frazier said the gender of teen drivers can result in an additional cost for boys or discount for girls of about 6 percent on their premiums. Drivers who list their gender as nonbinary probably would have been given a lower cost than boys, he said, though under the new rule, gender cannot be taken into account.
In a separate letter to the Insurance Department, the American Insurance Association, an insurance trade group, wrote: “Senate Bill 179 was designed to reduce barriers to existing name and gender change procedures. The bill was never intended, nor was it drafted, to affect established and demonstrated insurance rating factors such as gender.”
The association also cited a 2016 Insurance Institute report saying: “Men typically drive more miles than women and more often engage in risky driving practices, including not using safety belts, driving while impaired by alcohol, and speeding.”
In the rule-making process, Jones responded to the insurance groups by stating that “the Legislature may not have specifically intended to eliminate gender-based insurance rating” but that Atkins’ legislation had “relevance as a statement of California’s values around the role of gender in society.”
In an interview, Jones said the “the real driver for the change was that there was really no consistency with regard to how insurers were using gender as a rating factor.” Additionally, he said, gender is “not a characteristic that is within your control.”
Atkins said in a statement that her bill did not address the insurance, but she supports “efforts to ensure that all genders are treated equally.”
“However, it’s imperative that these changes be made thoughtfully and with strong input from Californians,” Atkins statement said.
The advocacy group Consumer Watchdog long had advocated for the change, saying in a statement after Jones acted: “Gender and sex have no more place in what we pay for auto insurance than race or ethnicity do. These new rules will finally end gender-based discrimination in auto insurance pricing in California.”
Insurance companies must submit gender-neutral pricing policies to the Insurance Department by July 1. The new pricing would take effect after that.
Frazier has called on the Department of Insurance to at least permit insurance companies to take into account drivers’ age, and certain safety features of newer cars in setting rates. Decisions on those requests are pending.
Read more…
___________________
San Diego will temporarily shelter
homeless in its own City Hall complex
Lisa Halverstasdt | Voice of San Diego
San Diego’s City Hall complex will soon house a homeless shelter.
After a shelter tent for homeless women and families closes this spring, Mayor Kevin Faulconer has decided to move the shelter run by nonprofit Father Joe’s Villages to the second floor of Golden Hall, an event center next to the city administration building.
Golden Hall will likely shelter as many as 150 homeless San Diegans at a time for about three months, Faulconer spokesman Greg Block said.
For more than a year, Father Joe’s Villages has run one of three shelter tents on its plot at 14th and Commercial streets in East Village. But the nonprofit said early on that it planned to build a supportive housing facility there, meaning the shelter would need to close by spring 2019.
For months, city officials have hurried to find a place to move homeless San Diegans and the tent itself. Now, Block said, the city has settled on both.
The tent itself will eventually go up at 1710 Imperial Ave., a parking lot across the street from Father Joe’s St. Vincent de Paul campus in East Village. The city expects the process will take about three months, and Block said the city recently finalized a lease with the property owner.
While Block said Friday he couldn’t immediately confirm the name of the property owner or other details of the lease, a Jan. 11 city notice first unearthed by the San Diego Union-Tribune said the property is owned by Breitbard Properties LLC.
Before the city and Father Joe’s move the tent to that property, homeless families and women who aren’t connected with more permanent homes by a yet-to-be-determined date in April will move to Golden Hall, a site that’s often been floated by homeless advocates.
___________________
Balboa Park Conservancy wins Southwest
Airlines national placemaking grant
The Balboa Park Conservancy has been awarded a $50,000 grant from the Southwest Airlines Heart of the Community program. Along with placemaking technical assistance, this support will be used to help further transform Balboa Park’s public spaces into thriving community gathering places. The grant is in the form of a Placemaking Visioning Workshop.
The workshop will help the Conservancy collaborate with its partners—stakeholders, government departments and agencies, elected officials, business and property owners, residents, and others—to elevate current placemaking efforts to the district or city level and through a more holistic approach. Content will focus on the importance of building and fostering a broader network of destinations. As a result, a vision plan with recommended actions will be produced to assist the grant recipients with next steps.
“This workshop gives us the opportunity to envision the best ways we can share Balboa Park experiences with our community and our visitors from around the world,” says Balboa Park Conservancy CEO Tomás Herrera-Mishler.
___________________
USD School of Law to hold memorial lecture
on landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling
University of San Diego School of Law’s 2019 Bergman Memorial Lecture will take place on Wednesday, 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., and will commemorate the 50th anniversary of Tinker v Des Moines – a 1969 landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that established students’ First Amendment free-speech rights in public schools. The lecture and reception are open to the public.
Where:Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice Theatre & Rotunda, 5998 Alcala Park, San Diego 92110.
The case began in 1965, when Iowa public school students wore black armbands to school in silent protest against the Vietnam war. After being suspended by their principal, the students sued. The case reached the Supreme Court four years later, and the justices decided by a 7-2 majority that the First Amendment did apply to public school students. “It can hardly be argued,” Justice Abe Fortas wrote in the majority opinion, “that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”
The lecture’s panel will be comprised of practitioners, a jurist, and a superintendent.
___________________
USD English professor to receive
creative writing fellowship of $25,000
The National Endowment for the Arts announced that Malachi Black, an assistant professor of English and creative writing at the University of San Diego, is one of 35 poets who will receive an FY 2019 Creative Writing Fellowship of $25,000. Through its Creative Writing Fellowships, the Arts Endowment gives writers the time and space needed to create. Fellows are selected through a highly competitive, anonymous process and are judged solely on the artistic excellence of the work sample provided.
Black was selected from nearly 1,700 eligible applicants. Fellowships alternate between poetry and prose each year and this year’s fellowships are to support poetry.
Black is the author of “Storm Toward Morning” (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and a selection for the PSA’s New American Poets Series. The recipient of a 2009 Ruth Lilly Fellowship, Black has since received fellowships and awards from the Amy Clampitt House, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Emory University, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the MacDowell Colony, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Yaddo.
___________________
Navy commissions another littoral
combat ship bound for San Diego
Times of San Diego
The Navy commissioned its newest littoral combat ship in San Francisco on Saturday, after which the USS Tulsa will head to its new home port in San Diego.
The trimaran-hull, Independence-variant littoral ship is the second to bear Tulsa’s name.
“This ship is named in honor of Tulsa, Oklahoma, but represents more than one city,” said Navy Secretary Richard Spencer. “USS Tulsa represents an investment in readiness and lethality, and is a testament to the increased capabilities made possible by a true partnership between the Department of the Navy and our industrial base.”
Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford gave the principal address and former Tulsa Mayor Kathy Taylor served as the ship’s sponsor.
“This is not just about Oklahoma history and Oklahoma tradition,” Lankford said. “This is American tradition.”
The ship will eventually join nine other Independence-variant littoral combat ships in San Diego.
The ships are fast, highly maneuverable vessels designed for mine countermeasures, anti-submarine warfare and surface warfare missions in the littoral regions of the world.
___________________
Personnel Announcements
Tom Pellette to become senior VP
of Caterpillar and president of Solar Turbines
, current group president of Caterpillar’s Construction Industries segment, has elected to return to San Diego to become senior vice president of Caterpillar and president of Solar Turbines, a wholly owned subsidiary of Caterpillar, effective March 1. Pellette previously spent more than 20 years in the division.
Pellette also will serve as strategi adviser to the Caterpillar Executive Office.
Since joining Caterpillar’s Solar Turbines Division in 1993, Pellette has held a range of sales, engineering and product support positions with increasing responsibility, including significant experience in leadership positions in Europe, Asia and the U.S. Prior to joining Solar, Pellette worked for Tennessee Gas and Leybold Technologies. In 2012, the Caterpillar Board of Directors named Pellette a Caterpillar vice president and the president of Solar Turbines. In January 2015, he was named a Caterpillar group president for Construction Industries, and in January 2017, Pellette was appointed group president of Energy & Transportation. He resumed the group president role for Construction Industries in June 2018.
___________________
Mick Spiers named general manager
for Cubic Transportation Systems Singapore
Cubic Corporation announced the appointment of Mick Spiers as general manager, Singapore, for Cubic Transportation Systems. Spiers is responsible for spearheading the company’s expansion program in the Asia-Pacific region.
Prior to joining Cubic, Spiers was an executive for French transport and technology company Thales, responsible for all business operations of the Revenue Collection Systems business in the Asia-Pacific region. His roles included vice president and chief executive officer of Thales Revenue Collection Systems (RCS) Asia-Pacific; vice president of strategy, marketing, product development and innovation; and company director of Thales New Zealand.
Spiers duties will include overseeing Cubic’s current transportation projects in Singapore and expansion into new markets in other growing economies in Asia. “I have a very strong vision about the future of mobility and the role that technology will play in shaping the cities that we live in and getting them moving freely again,” said Spiers.
___________________
Kevin Eagan joins Cubic Corporation
as senior VP and chief digital officer
Cubic Corporation announced the appointment of Kevin Eagan to the role of senior vice president and chief digital officer. Eagan will join Cubic’s executive team based in San Diego, effective March 25, and report to chairman, president and chief executive officer Bradley H. Feldmann.
Eagan joins Cubic from IBM where he served as chief digital officer for IBM Global Services. He led the creation and execution of IBM’s enterprise-wide digital transformation strategy and was the leader for IBM’s Apex program for C-suite clients. Eagan built and led organizations responsible for IBM’s digital platforms, modernization of sales and marketing tools and laid the digital foundation for IBM’s recent return to revenue and profit growth.
Prior to IBM, Eagan created and led multiple billion-dollar businesses throughout his 25-year tenure with Microsoft. The organizations he helped build and lead include Microsoft’s Online Store, OEM Channel Programs, Windows Media Center, eHome, Advanced Consumer Technologies, Developer Relations and product management for the first version of Excel for Windows.
Eagan earned his Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Economics from Harvard University.
