Many an insurance business would kill to see the kind of growth the FAIR plan has seen in recent years: about $69 million in under-writing profits in three years’ time. Not shabby, if you’re a growing insurance company.

But unlike a business, FAIR had zero control over that growth – when the tsunami of incoming homeowners policies first began in 2004, FAIR had no choice but to take them – and to add staff, work long hours, even pack some part-time employees in a converted file room.

Many states have seen blistering growth in their FAIR plans, but Massachusetts still has the second-largest number of policies under state control in the nation, with much of that growth happening in 2004 and 2005, according to the Insurance Information Institute. In 2006, the FAIR plan took up 8.6 percent of the overall property market in the state.

None of this is a good thing, says John Golembeski, FAIR Plan’s president.

“We’d prefer to go back to our historical roots,” he said – such as writing for a small number of high-risk properties, instead of 48 per-cent of Cape Cod and the islands, as they do now.

Ron Cassesso, president of the Boston-based Property Insurance Plans Service office, a nonprofit corporation that promotes efficiency in state insurance plans, said most FAIR plans lose money. In its early decades, he said, Massachusetts’ FAIR almost never turned a profit.

But it’s a different era. Driven by a flood of homeowners into the FAIR plan over several disaster-free years, FAIR has seen millions in underwriting profits since 2004, he said. It doesn’t keep those profits – they are distributed to Massachusetts private insurers based on their percentage of market share.

Likewise, private insurers have to fork over money to the FAIR plan when it runs a deficit, as it usually does. In 2003, for example, FAIR was $15 million in the red. The year before, it was down $4 million.

Profitability parallels 2004’s rapid jump in premiums: The plan had grown by 26 percent in 2004, 15 percent the next year and 8 per-cent in 2006.

But Golembeski says another shift is under way – in 2007, the FAIR plan shrank by .6 percent. Years of good weather that have lowered reinsurance costs and made the homeowners insurance market more profitable on the Cape and islands, he said, and a number of factors have drawn some private insurers back to the market.

So the FAIR plan will adapt to that, as well: it will gradually shed workers and downsize itself as needed, he said.

“We’re going to shrink,” he said. “Once you see it coming, you begin to plan for it.”