Former Florida insurance commissioner, treasurer and Congressman Bill Gunter died Monday at his Tallahassee home. He was 89.
“He was a strong, thoughtful public servant and pioneer in insurance regulation as commissioner of insurance, paving the way for future CFOs and working across party lines to ensure insurance consumers had the protections they needed,” Florida’s current chief financial officer, Jimmy Patronis, said in a statement.
Gunter was an insurance agent and manager with State Farm in the 1950s and 1960s, before he was elected to the state Senate, according to news reports. He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1972, then served as insurance commissioner, treasurer and state fire marshal from 1976 to 1988.
He also oversaw the merger of his agency with another in 2003, forming one of central Florida’s largest insurance firms, Rogers Gunter Vaughn Insurance.
Gunter later was chairman of the Florida Association of Insurance Agents and he raised alarms about the state of the Florida market and some financially struggling property insurers as far back as 2010.
“It is the job of the regulator to make sure that the financial underpinning of these companies is sufficient to pay their claims That wasn’t the case in these four that have gone away,” Gunter told Insurance Journal that year.
Twenty years earlier, he spoke out about misleading insurance TV commercials, according to the Archives of Florida and the Associated Press.
The FAIA honored Gunter in 2012 with its Mitchell Stallings Award, which recognizes a lifetime of leadership and service to the industry.
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