Chopp proposes home construction task force while Dem opponents fume

The politically dicey homeowners' rights bill proposed by retiring Sen. Brian Weinstein (D-Mercer Island) was paid lip service by House Speaker Frank Chopp (D-Seattle) Tuesday after weeks of silence. Chopp did so by asking for a task force to study the idea over the course of the coming months reports The Olympian's Brad Shannon. The bill, which was axed in the legislature last week, proposed to give homeowners the right to sue builders and contractors for shoddy work done on home building and improvement.

Chopp favors increasing license and competency requirements for builders, and creating a consumer protection office for home construction that would allow for homeowners to file complaints with the state. But Weinstein thinks Chopp's ideas are off the mark. "If he considers that a good faith offer, I would say thank you for the good faith offer. But it's not what I've been working on. It's not good enough," Weinstein told The Olympian. In the P-I, he went further and called the offer "a joke" because of the lack of enforcement mechanisms in the bureaucracy.

Another key player involved is the Building Industry Association of Washington, a Republican-leaning interest group that opposes the bill. The BIAW is one of the strongest lobbies in the state, and many on the left side are crying foul at Chopp's motives. "Who's running this place," asked Weinstein, "the legislators or the BIAW?"

Liberal blogs like horsesass.org (here, here, and here) and Slog (here and here) have been berating Chopp's inaction for weeks now. The homeowners' rights bill was killed in session last year, too, among criticism that Chopp's motives were BIAW-related. This task force, which Rep. Brendan Williams (D-Olympia) feared could put off action on the bill for up to a decade, appears only to keep this heated issue alive far beyond Thursday's session completion and the end of Weinstein's Senate career.

***Updated***

Later that afternoon, Sen. Weinstein released the news that he was willing to compromise with Rep. Chopp on the bill. Weinstein will agree to Chopp's thre-point plan of creating a task force to further discuss it, strengthening licensing regulations, and creating a formal complaint bureaucracy; provided that there is language to allow a homebuyer to bring legal action against a builder who has violated code after giving due notice and an opportunity to fix the error. Weinstein insists that this provision gives consumers their ownly means of protection to uphold the building code laws that are already on the books. So perhaps the issue will come to rest, after all. Updates tomorrow.