Business Notes AUTO INSURANCE

California motorists have been looking forward to auto-insurance refunds since November, when voters passed an initiative calling for a 20% cut in premiums for property and casualty coverage. But their anticipation turned to anger last week, when State Insurance Commissioner Roxani Gillespie declared that most Californians are "not going to get lower auto-insurance rates" as a result of the initiative.

The hitch is a May decision by the state supreme court, which upheld the initiative but ruled that insurance companies are entitled to "a fair and reasonable" profit. Most of the state's insurance firms maintained that they should be exempted on those grounds. After reviewing their profit statements, Gillespie said she found only 13 companies profitable enough to warrant rate rollbacks. She announced hearings to examine the exemption claims of 34 more firms, but further outraged critics by declaring that evaluations of more than 200 other companies could take as long as ten years to complete.