We have great news! Your phone calls, emails, and personal contacts with legislators have paid off! On Friday, the Judiciary Committee voted in favor of H.B. 6557 on its consent calendar (reserved for bills with unanimous support). This is a SIGNIFICANT victory.
Please thank the bill’s champion, Representative David Baram of Bloomfield, whose insight, thoughtfulness and persistence was essential to get this bill out of the Judiciary Committee. Judiciary Co-Chairs, Eric Coleman and Gerald Fox deserve our thanks too for their support and the leverage they wielded in forging a sound compromise. Please take a moment to thank them with your own email message. Their addresses are: David.Baram@cga.ct.gov, coleman@senatedems.ct.gov, Gerald.Fox@cga.ct.gov.
As reported by the Connecticut Forest & Park Association (CFPA), if passed by the full House and Senate, the bill will:
- Include municipalities (including municipal entities like the MDC, municipal water companies, etc.) as landowners under the Recreational Land Use Statute;
- Give greater protection against frivolous personal injury lawsuits for municipal lands that available for free and used for recreational purposes (such as paved and unpaved trails and open spaces). Lawsuits like these have caused many municipalities over the past 15 years to either consider closing their lands to the public, or to halt efforts to open new areas for recreation;
- Include cycling within the definition of recreational uses under the law; and
- Exclude more intensively managed and maintained areas such as swimming pools, playing courts, playgrounds, and buildings with electrical power from special protection under the Recreational Land Use Statute. These areas would retain the same higher standards of care that they have under current state law.
It is the irresponsiblity of Jurors who award damages in cases where an idiot, like the cyclist that ran into that very observable gate, fails to accept the consequences of their own irresponsbility. We should not have to make laws to counter irresponsibility, either of jurors or plaintiffs.
ReplyDeletePeople who take jury duty should not give awards for personal irresponsibility. They do so in, what can only be presumed, a hope that if/when they sue someone that a jury will be just as accommodating for them. This is wrong and until people change our elected officials will continue wasting their time crafting bills like this instead of working on more needful things.
Shame on what has become a self-indulgent society bent only on hedonistic values.