One of the roles of a local paper is to act as a hometown advocate, and I think in general terms The Sun News does a good job at it. On Jan. 21, though, I was disappointed you editorialized in trying to advocate for help with insurance here and wrote things that weren't true.

The editorial ("Insurance Bummer") misrepresented Gov. Mark Sanford's position on how the state should address the crisis in coastal property insurance.

Sanford does what he says he will do. This makes particularly galling the editorial's claim that the position he laid out in his State of the State address was new news. He was asked what to do on coastal insurance this fall during the gubernatorial debate over at Coastal Carolina University, and he responded then by saying the same thing he said in State of the State - that he favored a combination of statewide subsidies and market-based reforms.

Specifically, Sanford proposed a catastrophe fund, catastrophe savings accounts that encourage people to save for the losses that can come with a storm, and tax deductions for mitigation measures that reward people for making their property more resistant to a storm's damages.

In each of these things, he is pointing to market-based measures because he believes they work best, and I agree. Nixonesque price controls didn't work. Many others have tried the same before and since and have seen the same results.

I think what he is getting at in trying to let people use some of their own money on a tax-free basis to become less reliant on insurance companies is important. Tax credits and deductions that change market risks also change the cost of insurance.

The fact that he isn't being blatantly political and just telling The Sun News what some of the writers may want to hear is a virtue.

Let's be equally clear though in recognizing that what he has proposed is a subsidy for the coast. Both the catastrophe accounts and the tax credits are statewide subsidies. They address a coastal problem and decrease overall state tax revenues in order to provide coastal property owners with insurance premium relief. The paper could have said they would have preferred he offer subsidies in a different way, but it is wrong to say "it would have been naive to expect our governor to propose any plan that involved state subsidies" and that the governor expects "coastal folks to pay for insurance relief out of their own pockets."

Yes, the governor did say in the State of the State that it is important to advance market-based remedies that do not penalize people living at the opposite end of the state, or the next generation. Surely the writers at The Sun News critical of this position would not be for the reverse, believing the remedies should unduly penalize inland residents and pass along costs to our children. The "fix" for insurance in Florida has led to an almost $2 billion dollar debt for their next generation, which makes it not a real fix.

This will be a complex issue to get right, but as any of us advocate for improvements it is best we stick to the facts.