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Last October, Peter and Linda Kilfoil returned from an overnight trip and found water pooling in the kitchen of their Fort Lauderdale, Florida, home. The pair couldn’t pinpoint the source of the leak and had a hard time getting a plumber. So Linda Kilfoil called their insurer, Citizens Property Insurance Corp.
The call was the beginning of the Kilfoils’ journey through an alternate legal universe set up by Citizens, a quasi-governmental insurer in Florida, to reduce its staggering legal costs. In this state-sanctioned world, the judges’ salaries are funded by Citizens, the rules followed in Florida’s circuit courts don’t all apply and the insurance company almost always triumphs.
It’s a legal landscape so fraught that a Tampa judge recently paused all its proceedings — twice. But that didn’t come soon enough to help the Kilfoils.
Citizens sent an adjuster to their home the day after they called. He couldn’t pinpoint the source of the leak either but suspected it was coming from a pipe that drained wastewater from the kitchen, he said later in a deposition. He snapped photos of the warped, soggy cabinets. A short while later, Citizens denied their claim, saying that the damage to their cabinets was consistent with a long-term leak, and that their insurance contract excluded coverage of such leaks — unless they were hidden.
Eleven days after the denial, the Kilfoils’ plumber found the leaking pipe in the home’s exterior wall. It had been spilling water into a recess between their kitchen cabinets and slab foundation, records show. The total cost of repair has come close to $40,000, according to Linda Kilfoil and construction estimates provided by her attorney.
The Kilfoils had permanently relocated to Florida from Long Island to enjoy retirement. But with Peter Kilfoil ill with prostate and skin cancer, his wife faced the prospect of handling repairs while tending to his health.
“I am a former physician,” Peter Kilfoil said in an interview from the hospital. “I’m not like some carjacker. They accuse me of letting that leak persist until it destroyed my kitchen.”
Just before Thanksgiving, the Kilfoils sued Citizens. Instead of going to circuit court, as most lawsuits against insurers would, Citizens routed their case to arbitration before the Florida Division of Administrative Hearings.
On the surface, the change of venue — made possible by a provision lawmakers empowered Citizens to insert at the end of most of its policies — didn’t seem like a big deal. Legislators and Citizens executives touted DOAH as advantageous for both consumers and the insurer. Cases in the forum tend to move faster, cost less and are decided by expert administrative law judges rather than juries.
But in practice, homeowners forced by Citizens into DOAH have trouble exercising key rights.
Judge Britney Horton kept the Kilfoils’ lawyer from deposing a Citizens adjuster, siding with the company after it argued it had already made another employee available and produced “all non-privileged facts.” The ruling deprived them of a fair opportunity to investigate the denial, according to their attorney. On at least 20 other occasions, DOAH judges have issued similar rulings during a dispute’s fact-finding phase.
Judge Britney Horton
Credit:
State of Florida Division of Administrative Hearings
In addition, some DOAH judges have denied motions requesting that they disclose any potential conflicts they might have as arbitrators. Some plaintiff’s attorneys say that has made it difficult to trust in the impartiality of their decisions.
And the forum’s rules make it impossible for homeowners to drop their lawsuit without Citizens’ approval, unless they withdraw their claim, a move that can lead to court costs and attorney’s fees if not filed early in the process. Some have felt forced to go to final hearings where they lost and ended up owing thousands to Citizens.
“You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out something’s wrong,” said Chip Merlin, president of Merlin Law Group, a firm that represents insurance policyholders.
In a written response to questions about the homeowners’ experiences, Citizens spokesperson Michael Peltier defended the current process.
“We believe the statute authoring the resolution of claims by DOAH provides a well-established, impartial, and efficient process for policyholders, who no longer must wait nearly two years, on average, for a resolution of their claim,” he wrote.
When it comes to depositions, the forum is not “materially different” from Florida’s circuit courts, he added. And he explained that while homeowners are barred from dismissing their cases at DOAH — a move that might allow them to pursue the claim in circuit court — they aren’t blocked from withdrawing their claim, a more terminal maneuver. (Withdrawing, though, grants Citizens an automatic win and exposes homeowners to the risk of fees if it is not done soon after a case is sent to DOAH.) The company declined to comment on individual cases in litigation.
As of July 21, judges sided with Citizens in more than 90% of cases that made it to a final DOAH hearing where both sides presented their case, according to a ProPublica analysis of court records. (The steep odds were first highlighted by the South Florida Sun Sentinel.) In circuit court trials, Citizens has won about 55% of the time over the past five years, according to records released by the company.
Citing a procedural error in the request by the Kilfoils’ lawyers, Horton declined to push back the date of the final hearing after Peter Kilfoil had been hospitalized. She did not respond to a request for comment. Faced with long odds and failing health, the Kilfoils settled their case for the nominal sum of $500 that Citizens was offering, according to their attorney. “I was being a nurse to my husband daily,” Linda Kilfoil said, leaving little time to manage home repairs and fight the insurer. “I couldn’t leave him.”
Peter Kilfoil died at 77 on Aug. 22, 2025.
Of the Citizens cases resolved at DOAH between March 2024 and July 7, 2025, 78% ended in a settlement, according to data released by the insurer. Half of all cases settled for $500 or less to the policyholder, according to that data. An additional 28%, according to Peltier, were settled by Citizens for an average of $30,000.
Citizens’ customers cannot opt out of DOAH. Eventually, the insurer intends to send more than 3,800 cases a year there, according to a funding proposal approved by its governing board last year. Since February 2024, it’s sent over 1,500.
A multitude of public agencies in Florida contract with DOAH, relying on the administrative law judges to resolve disputes. As part of that process, they pay the agency for the salaries of judges who decide their cases, though they don’t play a role in the hiring of them.
But the program will have to survive stiff legal challenges. The most successful so far comes from Tampa, where a circuit court judge in August reaffirmed a statewide injunction pausing DOAH hearings after a Hurricane Milton victim argued the company was violating his rights.
“Specifically, enforcement of the arbitration clause at issue compels insureds into a forum that lacks neutrality, discovery, motion practice, and meaningful judicial review,” Judge Melissa Polo wrote in her order.
Citizens moved to disqualify Polo, arguing that she violated her impartiality as a judge by ruling the DOAH process unconstitutional before arguments could be heard in the case. Polo denied the motion.
“We look forward to making our case on appeal,” Peltier wrote of Polo’s decision to pause DOAH proceedings.
“Everybody in This Room, Everybody in the State of Florida Backstops Citizens” As Florida’s insurer of last resort, Citizens must take all comers who can’t get affordable insurance through another carrier. It gained the ability to take disputes to DOAH in the spring of 2023, at a moment of great peril for the insurer. Successive hurricanes had gouged a hole in the Sunshine State, leaving several private carriers insolvent — and leaving hundreds of thousands of their customers with no choice but Citizens. By the end of that year, the not-for-profit insurer was serving more than 1.2 million homeowners as another hurricane season loomed. It also had more than 18,000 outstanding lawsuits filed against it.
The company successfully lobbied the Legislature to let it take cases to DOAH in order to buffer it against the crises. The verbiage granting Citizens this power was tucked into HB 799 — a broader Citizens bill that, among other things, allowed it to raise rates faster on some policies — just after its third reading in the Florida House of Representatives Commerce Committee in April 2023.
State Sen. Jonathan Martin, a Republican and one of the bill’s sponsors, said Citizens officials proposed the DOAH provision to him in a meeting in his Tallahassee offices. Former Florida State Supreme Court Justice Ricky Polston, who had just begun what would be a brief stint as the insurer’s general counsel, was present at the meeting, Martin said.
“He and Citizens expressed the risk that they were facing, just like all the other insurance companies out there,” Martin said.
Polston would leave Citizens that June to go into private practice. He now charges Citizens at least $500 an hour to defend it from legal and constitutional challenges, including ones to the DOAH proceedings, records show, and his firm has billed the insurer almost $430,000 this year. Polston did not respond to a request for comment from ProPublica.
That amount, according to Peltier, is minuscule compared with the $450 million the organization has spent on legal services under contracts signed in 2021 and 2022. “The figure you mention of $430,000 reflects less than one-tenth of 1%,” he wrote.
Former Florida State Supreme Court Justice Ricky Polston
Credit:
Florida Supreme Court
There was little discussion of the DOAH provision in committee or in the well of the house, where the legislation initially passed 115-0. It wasn’t until HB 799 reached the floor of the Florida Senate on May 1, 2023, that two senators started asking questions.
“This very broad language is bad for the Citizens policyholders,” said Republican Sen. Erin Grall as she rose to offer an amendment that would strike the language from the bill. Foremost among her concerns was that Citizens policyholders would be giving up valuable rights, like access to the courts, without getting anything in return (private policyholders get a premium reduction when they agree to arbitration in Florida).
After raising her concerns, she withdrew her amendment, curtailing discussion. A few minutes later, Democratic Sen. Tina Polsky asked Martin, the bill’s sponsor, to address Grall’s concerns.
“In my opinion, Citizens is specially situated,” Martin said. “Everybody in this room, everybody in the state of Florida backstops Citizens,” Martin said, referring to a provision in Florida law that allows Citizens to levy a fee on every insurance policyholder in the state, including those of competitors, should the company ever find itself short of funds.
The company’s finances have stabilized in the intervening two years. It’s aggressively shed more than half a million insurance policies, offloading them to private insurers, and is down to about 12,600 outstanding lawsuits as of this June. And its DOAH program is expanding.
Judicial Economy Fort Lauderdale homeowners Yvonne Miller and Chaney Darric Keith wanted to stop pursuing their claim against Citizens this year.
Miller and Keith had intitially claimed that their shower pan failed, a leak they said damaged walls, baseboards and floors. Citizens had denied the claim. The pair had sued, but during the course of the litigation, it became clear that at least some of the damage had come from a long-term leak from their showerhead, which would not be eligible for insurance coverage. The pair’s lawyer tried to get the case dismissed. But at DOAH, that can’t happen unless both parties agree.
“I do not want to move forward with this,” said attorney Lourdes Bloomfield at a Feb. 17 DOAH hearing. Bloomfield had already tried two times to withdraw Miller and Keith’s plumbing claim against Citizens, filing motions to voluntarily dismiss the lawsuit and notifying the court of the withdrawal of her clients claim. Judge Terry Slusher had denied both of them, the second for being filed only one business day before the hearing.
“So just so that I can make it clear for myself, Citizens is not willing to permit Ms. Miller and Mr. Keith to withdraw their claim at this time?” the judge asked Citizens’ defense attorney, Holly Miller, a short time later.
“Those are my instructions, yes sir,” Miller replied, according to a transcript of the court proceedings.
Because the pair stated they wanted to withdraw the case and presented no evidence at their final hearing, the judge sided with Citizens and ended up ordering that the homeowners pay $10,677 in court costs.
Mary Ceron is another homeowner who attempted to quit but ended up at a final hearing against her will. As her hearing approached, her attorney said she requested a settlement where each side bore its own costs, but said Citizens did not agree. So Ceron withdrew her claim at her final hearing, and afterward she received a judgment against her for almost $45,000 in costs and fees. Citizens agreed to settle the case without collecting the money after the homeowner appealed, according to Ceron’s attorney.
The company, Peltier said, is looking for finality. Miller and Keith, he wrote, had initially attempted to quit their case in a way where it might be refiled, “and we don’t want that, we want finality.” Anyone who wants to stop their DOAH proceedings can do so, he said, by withdrawing their claim.
Citizens routinely pursues fees and costs against individuals who do not withdraw their claim early in the DOAH process. DOAH judges have granted more than 15 such requests, according to a ProPublica analysis of the agency’s docket. After being presented with a list of these cases, which included that of Ceron, Peltier wrote that the company pursues fees against some individuals who withdraw “to discourage lawyers from pursuing claims that lack merit.” Some 11% of DOAH claims through July 7 had ended in withdrawals or voluntary dismissals, according to data provided by the company.
Experts point out that Florida’s circuit courts allow for voluntary dismissals. “I’m not saying that what they’re doing is technically not in conformity with the rules, but it’s the only time I’ve heard it in a regular general civil case, such as an insurance dispute,” said Jack Tuter, former chief judge of Florida’s 17th Judicial Circuit, who independently reviewed DOAH cases for ProPublica and spoke generally of the forum’s practice of barring voluntary dismissals that aren’t agreed upon by parties.
A ProPublica review of the DOAH docket revealed at least 32 other cases in which homeowner attempts to drop their lawsuits were met with resistance from Citizens, forcing both parties to rack up legal costs.
“I think that’s one of the most vindictive things, in the 14 years I’ve been doing this, I’ve seen an insurance company do,” said Andres Correa, a plaintiff’s attorney who felt forced to go to a final hearing after Citizens refused to agree to a settlement in which each side bore its own costs.
Settling for Less Jeffrey McShane is a former Navy pilot and nuclear engineer. This March, as a lunar lander carrying a payload he helped design was using X-rays to observe the dance between Earth’s magnetic field and the solar wind, he was troubled by another concern: Was there any way to win against Citizens?
According to an architect’s report, in the course of two weeks in the spring of 2024, a pipe burst under the living room of McShane’s four-bedroom home, and then his roof — which had been replaced four and six years earlier — sprung a leak after a storm. The water shorted his air conditioning unit. Mold bloomed. An insurance adjuster he hired put the bill at just over $200,000.
Citizens said its policy didn’t cover some of the property damaged by the leak and said other damage was due to wear and tear and improper installation. It refused to cover the costs. “We found no evidence to support the homeowner’s claim of water intrusion through the roof’s surface on April 3, 2024,” an engineer hired by the company wrote after visiting the property.
Jeffrey McShane
Credit:
Courtesy of Jeffrey McShane
“I did not expect that the technical difficulty of navigating Citizens’ claims process would be far more difficult than getting a spacecraft to the Moon,” McShane wrote in an email to ProPublica.
As his final hearing approached, McShane’s learned that his chances of victory were almost nonexistent. No homeowner, up to that point, had won a DOAH case against Citizens. The insurance company was offering him $5,000 to settle. At the last moment, he decided a final hearing was too risky and took the money.
ProPublica heard from more than two dozen plaintiff’s attorneys who said their DOAH cases settled for less than what a homeowner would have gotten in state court.
Peltier, the Citizens spokesperson, offered a different perspective on settlements at DOAH. On average, cases there settle for about $18,000, compared with about $25,000 in state court. But some of that difference, according to Peltier, is due to older, pre-tort reform cases that carry more liability for the insurer.
Stainton Williams has been similarly befuddled by his interactions with Citizens.
According to his attorney, Michael Citron, a plastic tarp has covered the roof of Williams’ North Miami home for most of the past year. Williams, 92, is a Jamaican immigrant with end-stage kidney disease whose roof, parts of which are nine and 19 years old, began to leak after a period of heavy weather in late September that coincided with the passage of Hurricane Helene. On Oct. 11, 2024, Citizens denied Williams’ claim, writing that “we determined the damage sustained to your client’s property was caused by storm surge resulting from a hurricane.” (Citizens’ policies do not cover storm surge or floods.) Williams’ home is about 3 miles from the ocean, on the opposite side of the state from Hurricane Helene’s main impacts and where no storm surge or coastal flooding were reported by the National Weather Service.
Inconsistently, an engineer hired by Citizens to inspect the property disputed that the roof was damaged by Helene, writing “there was no damage to the roof covering system or exterior envelope from Hurricane Helene.” The insurer’s spokesperson declined an opportunity to clarify this seeming contradiction.
Stainton Williams
Credit:
Courtesy of Stainton Williams’ daughter
So Williams and his daughter, who has power of attorney, hired Citron and sued. When Williams’ case was sent to DOAH, Citron filed a motion requesting, among other things, that DOAH Judge Todd Resavage disclose any potential conflicts. The motion cites a state law that requires such disclosure from appointed arbitrators.
“The disclosures were requested in our case as they would be in any arbitration case,” Citron said. “Why that becomes important in this proceeding is because we didn’t choose the arbitrator. We didn’t even choose arbitration. It was all done by Citizens. So because of that, we at least want to know who these people are, who’s overseeing our case,” he added.
Resavage denied the motion for two reasons. First, he ruled the state law Citron cited did not apply because he had not been appointed but rather given his position by law. And even if that state law did apply, Resavage wrote, it wouldn’t require his disclosure unless there were “known facts that a reasonable person would consider likely to affect the arbitrator’s impartiality.” He did not respond to a request for comment from ProPublica. At least two other judges have denied similar motions for disclosure, according to a ProPublica review of the docket.
Asked about his thinking and intentions in regards to conflict of interest disclosures by administrative law judges, Martin, the bill sponsor, responded via text with a question. “Do those judges have to file a Form 6? Like all other judges?” After being informed that DOAH judges file Form 1, a less detailed disclosure, Martin ceased responding to texts and did not answer phone calls.
Agnel Philip contributed data reporting.
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches , a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.
Agnel Philip contributed data reporting.
Agnel Philip contributed data reporting.
