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Alex Winslow refused to accept Eleanor Kitzman’s contention last month that nothing could be done to remedy expensive homeowners insurance.
So the executive director of Texas Watch, a consumer advocacy nonprofit organization based in Austin, organized an e-mail campaign calling for help.
Texas Watch urged people to e-mail Kitzman, the Texas Department of Insurance commissioner, directly about her July statements to the state Senate Business and Commerce Committee.
But a senior Kitzman staff member “ordered the department's technology staff to prevent emails from people affiliated with Texas Watch… from being delivered to Kitzman,” according to an e-mail sent by the staffer and obtained through an open records request by theAustin American-Statesman.
“The department took decisive action to block emails from the citizens they are supposed to serve,” Winslow told the Statesman.
Jerry Hagins, a spokesman for the Insurance Department, said that it was never the commissioner's intent to reject the emails. ”Her intention was to respond to them,” Hagins said.
A sudden high volume of messages flooded Kitzman's email account and shut it down, Hagins said.
During the attempt to restore her e-mail, Kenneth Stock, assistant to the chief of staff, sent his own internal e-mail calling for a block to be put on mass e-mails to Kitzman. In hindsight, Hagins told the Statesman, the department should have created a folder to collect all of the form e-mails that poured in.
Kitzman has since responded to some of the e-mails, Hagins said.
Winslow called the response nothing more than “platitudes and generalizations” that did not begin to address how policyholders could deal with high-cost, low-coverage insurance policies.
***
Contact Mike Cronin at [email protected] or 713-228-2850. Follow him on Twitter at@michaelccronin or@texaswatchdog.
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Photo of Halt by flickr user Thomas Hawk, used via a Creative Commons license.
2012-08-23 07:35:31