I thought so...

I've gotten calls from customers who were worried because of signs posted in their apartment buildings. The signs, a result of Proposition 65, passed in 1986, have a general statement to the effect that the property may contain chemicals that are known to the State of California to cause cancer.

The first such call sent me to the Internet, where I learned that any business with more than ten employees had to post such a sign if they had carcinogens on site. However, the list of carcinogens is very long, and there's no penalty for having the sign if you don't have any of those chemicals on site.

I decided the people who were posting those signs were probably covering their rear ends, and left it at that.

Now I find there's a law firm that's suing small businesses and apartment buildings to enforce compliance with Prop 65. Their latest effort is to demand that posted signs specify the chemicals that may be present.

The Consumer Defense Group states that compliance with Prop 65 is no big deal. "We're talking about a $10 sign." Well, it's more than one for a large building, and if it has to list the specific chemicals that might be encountered, that could push the cost of the sign a lot higher.

And the signs cause other problems as well:

Tim Fuller, a Valencia Hills resident, said he believes owners of the complex are not sharing all the information. Fuller, who moved into the complex 10 months ago, said when he signed the lease, it said the complex "may" contain toxins. The signs recently posted on the entrances say "does." "What do they know now that they didn't know when they opened these apartments?" he said. "It's clearly worded differently. That information is supposed to be divulged before you move in."

Here we have someone who's been trained to expect absolute certainty. The apartment owners are expected to know about all the risks in the building. If they post a notice about one when no notice was ever posted before, he assumes the owners have been hiding the information up to that point.

This is an unreasonable standard. Apartment owners are not God. They are not omniscient. Blaming them for not notifying you about a risk they have just discovered is not reasonable. But unfortunately, many people are equally undreasonable, and many of those make it onto juries.