Late last week, the Associated General Contractors of America (AGC) continued its campaign to persuade the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) to change the way it decides whether to forgive Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans of over $2M. The specific target of AGC’s campaign is a Loan Necessity Questionnaire that has greatly surprised and frustrated the borrowers of such loans, as they now seek forgiveness of them.
ConsensusDocs is pleased to announce that Fox Rothschild LLP has joined as a contributor to the ConsensusDocs Construction Law Newsletter, which is one of the mostly widely distributed and used construction law resources in the industry.
Association Weighs Legal Options
Association Continues to Push for Changes to Form Itself
Together, AGC of America and its Michigan Chapter have extended the association’s long string of successful efforts to establish that the commercial general liability insurance (CGL) policy sold to construction contractors across the United States does provide coverage for property damage resulting from unexpected and unintended defects in a subcontractor’s workmanship (unless one of the policy’s specific exclusions applies). On June 29, 2020, the Michigan Supreme Court became the latest of many state supreme courts to agree that such damage is an “occurrence.”
On March 25, AGC called on the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), a division of the Department of Homeland Security, to issue a revision to recent COVID-19 related guidance that will explicitly include all construction workers as “Essential Critical Infrastructure Workers.” The absence of the word “construction” from many of the critical infrastructure workforces described in the guidance has become problematic as many state and local governments appear to be overlooking the memorandum and evaluating only the descriptions included under the various listed critical infrastructure workforces. In the few instances where construction is noted or, perhaps, implicitly referenced in the list, significant confusion has arisen. It is imperative that CISA issue a technical correction to this guidance to avoid states and localities from creating a confusing patchwork of regulations that would inhibit the full industry’s essential role in helping address the COVID-19 outbreak and protecting national security.
Cutting Off Vital Infrastructure Funding Will Hurt Efforts to Improve California’s Infrastructure and Air Quality; Construction Association Urges Federal Officials to Give State a Grace Period
On February 21, 2017, the Maryland Court of Appeals decided Balfour Beatty Infrastructure, Inc. v. Rummel Klepper & Kahl, LLP, where a general contractor had sought to hold the design firm that developed the plans and specifications for a large public project liable for the economic losses that defects in their designs had allegedly caused the contractor to suffer. Significantly, the project was design-bid-build and the contractor did not have a contractual relationship directly with the designers. The question that the case presented was whether the “economic loss doctrine” precluded the contractor from suing them in tort. Siding with the designers, the court held that the doctrine does apply “to large-scale government construction projects such as this one,” and as a result, the contractor could not bring a tort action against the designers for its purely economic losses.
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