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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Bill lets parents sue over deaths of adult children

Richard Roesler The Spokesman-Review

Three teens die in a fiery gas pipeline explosion. Two are minors; their grief-stricken parents sue for the pain and suffering of losing their children. Another is 18. And under the law, his equally grief-stricken parents are left unable to do the same thing.

That’s one of several real-life tragedies that Rep. Timm Ormsby, D-Spokane, says underscores the need for his House Bill 1873. It would allow parents of children as old as 25 or those who are developmentally disabled to sue for pain and suffering when someone’s responsible for their child’s wrongful death.

“The bill rights what has been an ignorance of the family relationship,” Ormsby argued last week. Largely gone are the days, he said, when children were fully independent, launched adults at 18.

Some lawmakers disagree. Eighteen is the age when you can vote, be sued and become legally responsible for yourself, pointed out Rep. Jay Rodne, R-Snoqualmie.

It’s impossible to put value on a human life, Rodne said. Yet he said he didn’t feel Ormsby and the bill’s other proponents had made a good case for extending the age limit. “There’s been no catastrophe in our system of civil justice,” he said.

The bill passed on a 64-32 vote.

A modest local win

Sen. Bob Morton, R-Orient, scored a win this month when the Senate passed his Senate Bill 5461.

It sounds like a little change: making permanent state timber officials’ four-year-old authority to contract with crews to fell trees according to specific instructions, instead of the more common system of identifying timber stands to sell and letting companies bid for the right to cut and haul away the logs.

This matters, Morton and other proponents say, beause there are millions of acres of timber in Washington with high numbers of dead, defoliated or insect-infested trees. Morton and other proponents say that being able to contract for cutting will help cut the risk of spreading disease and infection, as well as fire danger. Thinning those stands will make the state some money, make loggers some money, and provide some more logs for local mills.

Without the bill, such contract harvests would have ended this year.

Viaduct gridlock

After months of political jousting over how to replace Seattle’s decades-old Alaskan Way Viaduct, the voters there have spoken.

The question: How to replace the ugly, noisy elevated highway along Seattle’s otherwise scenic waterfront? The cheaper option, although not cheap, is to simply replace it with another elevated highway. But Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, declaring this a once-in-a-century chance to replace the eyesore, lobbied hard for a tunnel along the waterfront, albeit one that would cost at least hundreds of millions of dollars more.

Gov. Chris Gregoire and lawmakers balked, saying the tunnel is too expensive for taxpayers. Gregoire called for a vote on the options, hoping that Seattle would want the tunnel enough to agree to pony up the extra cash to pay for it.

Doing nothing is not an option, she repeatedly said, noting engineers’ worries that the viaduct will pancake in the next major Puget Sound earthquake. And if that happens and people die, she said over and over, everyone will be furiously trying to place blame for why the structure wasn’t replaced sooner.

Instead, Nickels pushed ahead with a slimmed-down “Tunnel Lite” that would be somewhat cheaper but still more than an elevated highway.

So which did Seattle choose? A simple elevated replacement? Or Tunnel Lite?

Neither, as it turns out.

“Nearly 70 percent voted against Tunnel Lite.

“And more than 55 percent voted against the elevated freeway.

No … and no?

So most Seattle voters don’t like either plan. And yet doing nothing is not an option.

Online: www.eyeonolympia.com.