The Senate Commerce and Labor Committee voted down the measure 13 to 2 with just one Republican and one Democrat siding with Howell, who had quietly maneuvered behind the scenes for much of the legislative session to garner support for the bill, HB 629. The House of Delegates narrowly passed the bill last month.
The proposal — one of the few that Howell (R-Stafford) put his considerable power behind — would limit liability for Philadelphia-based Crown Cork & Seal, which employs 300 workers at a pair of plants in Virginia.
Senators, including Committee Chairman Richard L. Saslaw (D-Fairfax), were unusually terse in their meeting, cutting off the company’s general counsel and asking him a series of pointed questions that made it clear which way they were leaning.
The vote came in the last week of the legislative session after company officials made an aggressive last-minute push, arguing they would have to close Virginia factories if the bill did not pass and asking plant workers to show up at the hearing wearing white stickers saying “Save Crown Cork.”
Howell’s chief of staff, G. Paul Nardo, said the speaker pursued the proposal because of his long-standing interest in tort reform and because of his involvement with the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative group that has been pushing the Crown Cork bill in state legislatures across the nation since 2006. Howell served as the group’s national chairman last year.
Crown Cork, which invented the bottle cap, bought a small, family-owned company for $7 million in 1963.
Before the sale, that company, Mundet, had been involved in asbestos insulation for years, company officials said.
Crown Cork has since been named in more than 300,000 asbestos claims; it paid $600 million in expenses and has been hit with higher interest rates on borrowing, according to company documents.
“Crown would have no way of knowing that 10 years in the future the greatest mass tort in the history of the world would rear its head,” William Gallagher, the company’s general counsel, told senators Monday.
“You didn’t just arrive here from Mars,” Saslsaw responded a few minutes later.
Owens Illinois, a Fortune 500 glass container manufacturer that argues it would pay more in asbestos claims if Crown Cork was no longer held liable, opposed the bill as did trial lawyers, manufacturers and some unions.
Since 2007, Crown Cork has spent more than $100,000 on lobbyists to get the bill passed and donated more than $100,000 to 46 Virginia legislators or their political action committees, according to the Virginia Public Access Project, a nonpartisan tracker of money in politics.
Va. Senate panel kills bill that would shield business from asbestos lawsuits