Re: Wynn Everett Casino | Everett
The state really should have a preliminary hearing process where appeals without merit can be dismissed. I think this is on the Governor to fix by issuing new regulations.
What you seek already exists.
The first step of every appeal is for the appellate court to decide if there exists sufficient grounds to bother actually hearing it. This is nearly always done by a subset of the appellate court, so there's fewer schedules to juggle. There is a very non-trivial percentage of cases where that panel responds with (translated from legalese), "nah, there's no meat on these bones, we're not wasting our time with this." Appeal gets tossed.
The governor could not change this with administrative regulations in his wildest fantasies; he and the legislature would have to act in concert. Even if the legislature and the governor actually
could act cooperatively to change the court system (I doubt it), they all have far more important things to be doing than to be farting around adding a duplicative layer to an already very complicated court system. Like, for instance, giving the court system sufficient resources to be able to function at some reasonable turnaround time instead of everything taking forever (we've underfunded our court system as badly as we've underfunded everything else). Adding layers would slow it down even worse.
Also, appeals are mainly fought on
process. If you appeal something with the argument, "the lower court, or the agency in question, they were just
wrong, please make them change their decision", you've got a real good chance of the appellate screening panel tossing your ass out. (Ideology can rear its head and create exceptions to this.) What you mainly need to do to get into appellate court is argue convincingly, "the agency (or lower court) did not account for factors x, y, and z, and failure to consider those factors was a violation of the agency's
own rules, please make them reconsider the matter using x, y, and z this time."
I did not follow the EIS saga on this and don't have the time to go read the thing. But I've heard it asserted here at aB and elsewhere that the EIS process on this casino left much to be desired. If there's truth to that, then that makes it easier for Curtatone or anyone else to get their foot in the door of an appellate court. And if it's true that the EIS process was sloppy enough to allow leeway for appeals, the place to direct one's energies is not in trying to change the appeals process, (which is mainly just backlogged to near-death, as opposed to being procedurally broken*), it's to find the people who fucked up the EIS process and ask them why they fucked it up.
*ETA: OK, there probably are some procedural fixes worth making, but adding another layer of pre-screening to the appellate process ain't one of them. They already reject lots of appeals without merit - once they finally slog through the backlog to get to them.