City Hall was recently brought back into the case after a panel of state appellate court judges threw out an earlier ruling granting City Hall design immunity.
At the heart of the decision was a piece of paper that allegedly served as the market’s traffic management plan. A Santa Monica judge ruled that since a traffic management plan was in place and had been approved by a certified traffic engineer, City Hall could not be held liable under design immunity.
The rationale for design immunity is to prevent a jury from second-guessing the decision of a public entity that has gone through the required steps.
The appellate court said the traffic management plan, essentially a sheet of paper with a diagram of the market and writing stating where streets would be closed, did not include barricades that had been approved by the traffic engineer. The engineer also testified that he could not recall if the handwrit-ten notations on the paper were on a plan shown to him by the market manager.
“Accordingly, the details surrounding Attorneys for City Hall argued that the market was not in a dangerous condition on the day of the crash and that testimony from the traffic engineer clearly shows that the piece of paper in question was the approved traffic management plan.
“The ruling was made purely on procedural grounds and doesn’t say anything about the merits of the plaintiffs’ lawsuit,” said Chief Deputy City Attorney Jeanette Schachtner, who is in charge of civil liability. “This is a factual dispute about the approval of the plan that needs to be resolved in future court proceedings. The city will show that this is the plan that was approved, and once that issue is resolved, I believe the city is entitled to the design immunity.”
Schachtner anticipates that the issue of design immunity will be resolved before the case goes to trial,which is set for February 2008.
“This (ruling) does bring the city back into the lawsuit, but only temporarily,” she said.
As for Weller testifying, Schachtner said it is important for the community to hear from Weller about what happened that fateful day.
“He was the cause of this accident,”she said. Attorneys for Weller said in his criminal trial that the former food broker suffered from “pedal error,” and accidentally mistook the gas for the brake. The jury in his criminal trial felt Weller may have made a mistake initially, but had plenty of opportunities to correct that mistake, which he chose not to take.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on October 17, 2007. Read the original PDF.