Mr. Robert S. Mone

Robert Mone, owner of Mone Insurance Agency in Vineyard Haven, said the driving force behind the increase in insurance rates is the cost of reinsurance, which backs up claims by insurers.Some insurance companies have blamed the high cost of reinsurance as the reason for dropping coastal policies.

For Cape and Islands residents, the trend hit a critical point in 2004 when the Andover Companies stopped covering the region.Over the next three years at least seven more insurers declined to renew some or all of their Cape policies, leaving more than 43,000 homeowners looking for new insurance coverage.

Mr. Mone, who estimated that 55 cents of every dollar spent on home insurance goes toward purchasing reinsurance, said writing home insurance policies is a losing proposition for Island insurance providers.

"If we only wrote home insurance policies we would be out of business," he said candidly.

Mr. Mone said he supports a temporary moratorium on any further rate increases, but only as a way to buy time to look at the problem and come up with a more comprehensive solution.

"Anything that can save people money is a good thing.But something more needs to be done to address the problem; in the meantime I worry it is only going to get worse before it gets better," Mr. Mone said.

Principals: Robert S. Mone, David N. Lawrence, James F. Carlin

Gayle and Bob Mone were founding participants in the 1980s when the Martha's Vineyard Arena was still a Currier and Ives print, an outdoor sheet of ice on 3.2 acres of land donated by the high school; a place where a few men formed a hockey team, families bonded, and toddlers like Jonathan and Ryan Mone, who went on to become varsity hockey players, both wearing number 23, wobbled and giggled and learned to glide.
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Robert and Tara Levine contributed $350,000 to the fundraiser, later pledging over $100,000 more.
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Bob Mone of Mone, Lawrence & Carlin Insurance Agency, Inc., is one of eight children, the son of the late William Mone, a Massachusetts Superior Court Judge, who'd spent summers on the Vineyard.He met Mrs. Mone, a college student from North Carolina, in 1972 in an Oak Bluffs bar on her first day of work as a waitress."Love at first sight."She smiles a fragile smile.They married six months after the summer's end and moved to the Vineyard.

Mr. Mone worked as a fish broker.Mrs. Mone worked for a bank, then for their friend, the late attorney Ed Coogan, the Edgartown School and, for the past two years, as assistant to author David McCullough, who attests, "I can tell you that she likes things done right."
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Mrs. Mone adds, "It's not just the facility, it's not the material things, it's what's inside it.So even though when there was nothing in there, the boys were what's important.I mean they gathered together cold and wet and smelly and it was the camaraderie and they were fine with that."

"It's been said that when you have such a loss you can't keep in the same direction," Mrs. Mone says.
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Mrs. Mone pauses to look at a display of hockey sticks from the high school's varsity teams mounted on the arena wall just off the lobby.Each stick has been signed by all the members of the team.Standing still, she peers closer at the team signatures from the 1995-1996 season.

"This is a real problem and the most significant impact on insurance [rates] this year," said Robert Mone, owner of Mone, Lawrence & Carlin Insurance Agency Inc. in Vineyard Haven.

"We're getting more and more calls all the time as people start getting their bills," he added.
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There is no response as far as they're concerned," Mr. Mone said, a West Tisbury resident whose own home insurance increased $400, up nearly 50 per cent.
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Mr. Mone is particularly concerned about the staying power of the two companies willing to take on homes valued over $1 million.

"They could easily decide to pull out," Mr. Mone said.

It's an unappealing market for insurance companies, Mr. Mone said.