As Representative Ed Delaney revisited the site of the stage collapse, he said he's also pushing the legislature to revisit the state's cap on damages in order to increase the payout to victims.
Delaney says the problem is the state has two caps on damages. The cap for each person is $700,000. If you applied that amount to the seven deaths and 40 injuries the bill would total $32.9 million. However, the state isn't paying that amount because of the cap of $5 million per incident.
"The overall limitation doesn't make sense when you have so many injuries and so many deaths," Delaney said. "It's just unfair. How are they ever going to divide this pie, which is too small?"
According to the Congressional Budget Office, Indiana is among 34 states with caps on damages, but even among those states exceptions have been made. For example, following the 2007 bridge collapse in Minnesota, Lawmakers agreed to waive their $1 million cap and approved more than $36 million dollars to be paid to the victims.
"There's been an amazing amount of success," Delaney said. "I wouldn't have predicted it, but the mediation process works, the bring everyone in the room process has worked. I think it would work in Indiana. There is a lot of goodwill here."
Delaney says he would like the legislature to consider changing the cap permanentely because he believes it's unreasonable for any large-scale incident. At the very least, he says lawmakers have to do something to address what happened at the fairgrounds.
"The good news is that people helped each other here," Delaney said. "I mean, that's what we did instantaneously and all I'm really saying is let's do that again as a legislature."
Fox59 News asked Governor Mitch Daniels’ office if he might support an increase in the $5 million cap.
"It's too premature to even respond to the question at this point,” spokeswoman Jane Jankowski said. “We have two investigations underway. We don't know what the facts are."
House Speaker Brian Bosma's office said they are not ready to comment on the proposal at this time.
