A healthcare worker gives a vaccine shot.
SEATTLE – The COVID pandemic was not a “natural disaster,” a Washington court has ruled as a hotel trade group seeks tax relief because the state’s former governor had it declared a “major disaster.”
The state Court of Appeals in Seattle issued its judgment Monday in a lawsuit brought by the Washington Hospitality Association against the King County assessor’s office, which denied claims to ease property-tax burdens.
They should have been granted, WHA argued to the court, because no physical damage is required by the “natural disaster” – only loss in value. And that happened to the hotel industry in 2020 as the world wrestled with stay-at-home orders and social distancing.
Another state law calls for tax exemptions in the case of a “natural disaster such as a flood, windstorm, earthquake or other such calamity rather than by virtue of the act of the organization, association, or corporation changing the use of such property.”
“These related provisions disclose legislative intent,” Judge David Mann wrote. “These provisions describe the term natural disaster as something that is physically destructive and weather-related.”
The law was amended to include natural disasters following the 1981 eruption of Mount St. Helens and gave aid to owners of property that diminished in value. Thirty-nine years later, hotels argued that was happening to them, with the state Department of Commerce reporting the hospitality industry lost more income than any other industry in the state.
WHA also lost in the trial court and was frustrated by jurists’ reliance on dictionaries to determine meanings of terms in state law. Natural disasters have triggering events and consequences, it said, and the cause was natural – a virus.
It originated on Earth’s surface, WHA added. “Human-driven disasters only exist because of human intervention, unlike the COVID-19 pandemic,” its brief said.
“Without human intervention, oil is not removed from its natural location and spilled. If a bridge collapses unprovoked by a natural disaster, it is also human-driven, perhaps due to faulty engineering or construction or some human-driven object hitting the bridge.
“Terrorist attacks only occur where humans carry out an intentional act of destruction. But without human intervention, viruses jump from host to host all the time, and occasionally this causes a pandemic.”
