Mayor’s Effort to Protect Developers Endangers Voters

As part of his ongoing efforts to promote more development in Lakewood, Mayor Murphy had his city council create new legal protection for shoddy condo builders. Called the construction defects bill, the new ordinance makes it impossible for new condo projects to sue their builders for any shoddy construction work.

Regardless of the relative merits of having the city step in to protect his developer buddies, the measure denies the legal right of homeowners to go to court to force builders to correct their mistakes. This means the right to access the court system is diminished in Lakewood as opposed to the rest of the state of Colorado. This discrepancy in treatment will eventually lead to lawsuits against the city to throw out this different set of rules. When this happens the taxpayers of Lakewood will have to pay the legal costs of defending this erroneous rule.

The mayor promises that the state legislature will come to Lakewood’s rescue and change the state rules to match the new city rules. Given the failure of the legislature to make these changes last year it is quite a gamble the mayor is making with our money.

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