Mercury Insurance may not be great to its employees (you may remember last year Mercury laid off 363 of its workers), but its campaign consultants make a mint.

No wonder Kathy Fairbanks — the spokeswoman for Cal-FAIR — the Mercury Insurance ballot initiative (Prop 17) mouthpiece — keeps at it for Mercury Insurance. In fact, looks like her firm, Bicker, Castillo & Fairbanks has raked in almost $200,000 since last August. Not a bad chunk of change for six months work. But, she’s not the only one.

Jim Conran in his latest incarnation as head of Consumers First, Inc. has not done too badly working for Mercury’s execs. I mean its not Fairbank’s kind of money, but $5,000 a month for helping out George Joseph, the billionaire chairman of Mercury Insurance, is nothing to sniff at in these tough times. Especially since Mr. Conran, much like Ms. Fairbanks, has worked on or continues to work on all sorts of front group projects:

Mr. Conran is listed as the executive director for Consumers for Cable Choice. His partner in this and other front groups is Bob Johnson, an Indiana lawyer who apparently represents nearly two-dozen telecom firms. Leveraging clients at the expense of consumers, clever;

Mr. Conran is listed as the executive director for Consumers for Competitive Choice;

Mr. Conran is listed at the co-chair for Californians for Fair Auto Insurance Rates (Cal-FAIR) coalition. (He is working overtime for Mercury);

Mr. Conran is listed as the, you guessed it, executive director of the Child Safety TaskForce with again, his friend, Bob Johnson. (This is one of my favorite of his front groups. It is particularly craven. I will have more on that in my upcoming posts);

Mr. Conran also runs Credit Card Con, a project of Consumers for Competitive Choice;

Mr. Conran also heads up the Citizens to Stop the Power Grab Coalition (the website has been pulled down, but its goal is stated as: “Stop Eminent Domain Abuse in Manteca, Ripon and Escalon”) and;

Mr. Conran also helps out Truth About Splenda.

Now, we can’t know what Mr. Conran is being paid for all of these altruistic activities, but if he is cashing in from the industry folks that fund his other work, anything like Mercury’s monthly checks to him, he is doing a-okay in this economy.

It seems to be the day for me to complain about ballot measures. Hey, there’s worse things to complain about, right?  Well, anyway, Prop 103, passed waaaay back in 1988, amongst other insurance reforms, barred insurance companies from doing big surcharges for customers that weren’t previously insured.  There’s good reasons to stop paying for auto insurance, like, say you didn’t have a car and were using public transportation, or that you were out of the country, such as deployed soldiers. These are all good, compelling reasons not to have insurance.  After all, it is a good thing when people don’t have cars, right? Isn’t that the point of services like ZipCar and City Car Share?

But, Mercury Insurance was finding that a bit inconvenint, so they’re doing they’re best to overturn it. Of course, that is their right given our rather decrepit governmental structure, but Mercury has to understand that they’ll also be called out for it. Consumer Watchdog, the successor organization to the folks that passed 103, are still taking it to Mercury.

Mercury Insurance’s whopping surcharges to motorists who’ve had a lapse in their coverage in other states is “smoking gun” proof that Californian motorists will face the same hit to their wallets if voters approve a ballot measure underwritten by Mercury, a consumer advocate charged Wednesday.

In a video demonstration using Mercury’s Web site, www.MercuryInsurance.com, which offers insurance quotes, Harvey Rosenfield, the founder of Consumer Watchdog, showed that a typical middle aged man with a modest car in Nevada would be charged $835 for six months if he answered yes to the question of whether he currently had coverage. If that same motorist answered no, the six-month premium was quoted as $1,448 — a 73 percent markup, or surcharge. In California, that is illegal.

Similar or higher surcharges by Mercury have been found in Texas (67 percent) and Florida (227 percent), said Rosenfield, the author of Proposition 103, the 1988 voter-approved law that prohibits insurance companies from raising rates based on previous coverage.(CoCo Times 1/21/2010)

Sure, Mercury will tell you now that they’ll just give discounts, but the data from other states bears out what really happens. This could end up being quite an expensive little measure.