In his April 16 guest column for The Columbian (“Trial lawyers pursue accountability”), trial lawyer lobbyist Larry Shannon opines that Washington’s expensive and expansive tort liability is the only way to hold government accountable. This false mantra of accountability through unlimited liability is repeated with frequency and force by lawyers who hope it will be accepted as fact.

The fact is, if runaway lawsuit liability made public agencies more accountable, then Washington’s lawsuit payouts would be trending consistently downward. Instead, payouts continue spiraling upward at alarming rates. Total liability payouts have grown exponentially from $241,000 in the 1963-65 biennium to a record $109 million for 2001-03. At a time when state and local budgets are stretched, this means less funding is available for necessary health, public safety and crime prevention programs.

In his guest column, Shannon implies that a lawsuit against the city of Vancouver by an injured pedestrian forced the city to realize it needed to make safety improvement at that crosswalk. That implication is completely untrue. The fact is, even before the accident occurred and long before the lawsuit was resolved, the crosswalk had been listed as part of a $200,000 project the city identified during its regular safety process — scheduled to be improved when funding was available.

We all agree accountability is vital in our state. There are many proven ways to hold government accountable, such as a robust Open Public Records Act and a strong Open Public Meetings Act, where citizens and the media can observe and participate in improving government.

Accountability is also accomplished through a solid personnel system where unacceptable conduct by employees can be disciplined quickly. Lawsuits cannot provide this kind of immediate accountability, particularly since cases can be filed up to three years after an incident and take many more years to resolve after that.

Oversight crucial

Legislative and gubernatorial oversight are also crucial methods of accountability. Working with state agency executives, the attorney general’s office assists in identifying areas where state agency practices can be improved, helping our client agencies deliver their services to the public in the most efficient and safest manner possible.

The unfortunate reality is government is charged with inherently risky responsibilities like building safe roads with constantly changing design standards, tracking criminal offenders out on community supervision and protecting children and the elderly from abuse in their own private homes.

These situations are consistently the most expensive tort cases for the state and are almost always situations in which government is held liable for the negligent or even criminal misconduct of a person who is not a state employee and not under the control of the state in any realistic sense. In Washington, if government is even 1 percent at fault for an accident, the taxpayers frequently end up having to pay 100 percent of the damages. Most other states have found effective ways of holding public officials accountable without the extensive punishing of taxpayers.

I have worked with Attorney General Rob McKenna to educate our Legislature on how other states have reconciled issues of civil justice for accident victims, accountability for public employees and fairness for taxpayers. In no way have we ever suggested government should be exempt from accountability for its actions by reinstating sovereign immunity — rather, we suggest Washington bring its laws into line with other states around the country.

Expanding lawsuit liability under the hollow promise of better government simply doesn’t work. All it does is deliver increased costs to taxpayers without any tangible benefit to the public.

Senior Counsel Rene Tomisser was hired as a tort attorney by Washington State Attorney General Ken Eikenberry in 1987 and has served in that capacity under Attorney General Christine Gregoire and Attorney General Rob McKenna.