Lawmakers block suits against lead-paint manufacturers

From Columbus Dispatch reporter Jim Siegel this morning, reporting on Ohio House and Senate votes that critics charge will weaken state consumer protection laws:

Ignoring a last-minute warning from the current and future state attorneys general that they were about to "undermine" consumer protections, the House and Senate yesterday approved a bill to cap damages available under the Consumer Sales Practices Act.

The bill, amended and passed in about 26 hours, also will effectively block anyone, including cities, from suing lead-pigment manufacturers to get them to assist with the cleanup of houses where the poisonous paint still poses a danger, especially to children.

The move is expected to prompt Columbus city officials to move quickly to file a lawsuit before the law could take effect. Gov. Bob Taft has not said whether he will veto the bill.

Before the votes, lawmakers saw a first-ever joint news release from Republican Attorney General Jim Petro and Democratic Attorney General-elect Marc Dann. It said if the bill passed, "one of the nation's best consumer protection laws will be gutted and consumers will have little protection against unscrupulous businesses who have little incentive to comply with the weakened law."

Petro and Dann said the bill would adversely affect Ohio's anti-predatory lending law, set to take effect in two weeks, which puts much of the home lending industry under the Consumer Sales Practices Act.

The bill says noneconomic damages, often awarded for pain, embarrassment or other suffering with no monetary value, are capped at $5,000 under the Consumer Sales Practices Act. It still allows for economic damages, which in a number of cases can be tripled by the court.

Republicans said that still leaves potentially big court damages.

"We have not gutted it," said Sen. David Goodman, R-New Albany. "We've done what it was originally intended to do."

An animated Speaker Jon A. Husted, R-Kettering, insisted that when they passed the predatory-lending law this spring, noneconomic damages had not been awarded before, so lawmakers did not think they were available under the Consumer Sales Practices Act.

That changed, he said, when the Ohio Supreme Court said in November that such damages were available. So the legislature felt compelled to react.

"To say we are doing anything that messes with the intent of predatory lending is false," Husted said, adding that lawmakers are adding noneconomic damages where he didn't think they existed before. "So as far as statute goes, this helps people with predatory lending more than it hurts them."

Sen. Joy Padgett, R-Coshocton, who sponsored the predatory-lending law, voted against the damage limits yesterday, saying "the changes took a few steps backwards."
Petro called the bill "a step backward that will leave Ohioans vulnerable."

Asked about Petro's statement, Husted said, "He wasn't part of the debate on the bill. He wasn't here and he didn't sit through all of this, so he doesn't know what he's talking about."

With lead paint, legislative Republicans said they were acting to stop trial lawyers from filing nuisance cases that are actually product-liability cases.

"What the plaintiffs' lawyers are doing now in the paint context is akin to trying to hold the fertilizer manufacturer responsible because the hogs stink," Rep. Bill Seitz, R-Cincinnati, said, adding that lead-based paint has been outlawed in the United States since 1978.

"Anybody should have painted their walls between 1978 and now," he said.

Most agree that cities could not win a product-liability lawsuit against paint companies, because they cannot prove who made the paint on every wall, and the statute of limitations would run out.

Rep. Mike Foley, a Cleveland Democrat and former director of the Cleveland Tenants Organization, said because the older dwellings where lead-based paint is most prevalent are often in low-rent areas, the landlord community can not afford to properly clean up the paint.

That, he and others argued, leaves local taxpayers stuck with the bill.

"Basically, we're letting the lead-paint industry off the hook for the harm they caused our children," he said.

Article here.