Projo Politics Blog

Good things come to those who wait.

Checks will soon be in the mail for 14 Rhode Island residents, from Chepachet to Wakefield, who filed claims last year with the state alleging damage for which the state is at fault. (Most of the cases involve cars and potholes on state roads.) The list of payees also includes one Massachusetts resident, Susan Timberlake of Somerset, Mass., whose vehicle “struck a roadway defect” on Route 195 in East Providence “on or about June 30, 2005.”

Each year in the closing days of the legislative session, lawmakers pass an omnibus bill of sorts, approving payment for claims filed since the end of the previous year’s session. Each claim is filed by an individual lawmaker on behalf of a constituent. The claims that make it into the final bill — the “joint resolution making an appropriation to pay certain claims” — are researched and verified by legislative staff, according to House spokesman Larry Berman.

But last year, as the legislative session drew to an end in late June, the Senate inadvertently neglected to pass the House version of the bill, Berman said. So the same bill was resubmitted Jan. 16, soon after the start of this year’s session. It was passed by both chambers and became effective without the governor’s signature March 27.

Berman said the claimants have now been sent notices they will be paid and must sign a release promising not to sue the state for the same incident after receiving payment. Checks will go out once the forms come back, within three weeks, Berman said.

The holdup meant that in many cases, people’s checks will be arriving two full years after the incident that prompted the claim. The resolution includes claims filed during the second half of 2005 and the first half of 2006, without regard to when the incidents occurred.

The 15 claims total $8,011.82. The largest of the bunch: $1,931.40 paid to MetLife Auto Insurance on behalf of Warwick resident Iris I. Rodriguez-Jones, whose car “collided with a parking lot curbing, faultily maintained,” near the John J. Moran Medium Security Unit at the Adult Correctional Institutions, in Cranston, “on or about Oct. 5, 2005.”

The smallest: $140.08 paid to Charles F. Pollack Sr. of North Providence for damage to his vehicle when it “struck a roadway defect” at the Route 195-Route 95 interchange in Providence “on or about Feb. 17, 2005.”

Jean P. Christy, of Smithfield, was particularly unlucky. Her name is on the list twice.

Christy says she was driving her Volkswagen convertible near Route 6 and Atwood Avenue in Johnston in June 2004 when a boulder flew from a construction site and shattered her windshield.

A year later, in May 2005, Christy says she was driving near another construction site, at Routes 116 and 101 in Scituate, when construction debris hit her windshield and cracked it, forcing her to replace it again.

Christy — a state employee who works in the financial aid office at the Community College of Rhode Island — says she paid a total of $1,070 for the two new windshields, but the state agreed to pay her only $700. Still, she said, “I’ll be happy to get anything.”

After yet another incident last year in Foster, in which Christy blew two tires when she hit “a pothole so big I almost flew out of my convertible,” Christy unloaded the unlucky Volkswagen, she said. She plans to file a claim for that incident this year.

--By Elizabeth Gudrais, Katherine Gregg and Steve Peoples
Journal State House Bureau

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