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Thursday, April 07, 2016

Swatting a fly with a very large iconic structure

I don't know if I have the exact correct perspective on this since I am not a law talking guy or a friend of the mayor's or anything.  But this seems like overkill.
Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s administration has taken its courtroom spat with a losing bidder on the World Trade Center redevelopment project to the Legislature, working with a state lawmaker on a bill that could make lawsuits over such public development projects far more financially risky.

A bill filed this week by Sen. Conrad Appel, R-Metairie, would require any company bringing a lawsuit against a public-benefit corporation — a quasi-public city agency — over its choice of a contractor on a public development to put up cash or a bond equal to the rent the agency would have received over the first few years of its lease with that contractor.

That way, should the lawsuit fail and a judge decide to award the agency damages for the delay caused by the legal proceedings, the money already would be set aside.

Otherwise, a company may have “no assets at all” but still bring a lawsuit that costs a public agency “hundreds of millions of dollars,” Appel said. “That’s why we did this.”

The bill is specifically aimed at a legal challenge already brought by Two Canal Street Investors Inc. against the city’s selection of another team of companies to redevelop the former World Trade Center building at the foot of Canal Street. But it would apply statewide.
We've mentioned before that the specific people this legislation is aimed at seem to be unsavory characters.  But does imposing a new wealth based prerequisite for filing grievance against the very often questionable decisions of public-benefit corporations in matters like this sound like the correct response?  What kind of a person would think this is ok?

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