If potential house buyers need additional protection from home builders, the answer isn’t to adopt a new state law that would drive a ton of money into the hands of lawyers and make more new homes simply unaffordable.

That would be the likely outcome of a ballot campaign that filed petition signatures Monday purporting to support a consumer protection measure.

So far the initiative has been funded mostly by the Sheet Metal Workers International Association, an union locked in contract disputes with Arizona’s home building industry, Capitol Media Services reported. Bad motivations don’t automatically make for bad law. But what’s contained in the “Homeowners Bill of Rights” certainly smacks of a vendetta rather than balancing the rights of seller and buyer in a commercial transaction.

First of all, the initiative would require home builders to provide a 10-year warranty on the entire house — every bolt, washer and roofing shingle — without any consideration for the additional costs involved in using such top-quality or impossible-to-find materials. When something does go wrong, even if it’s not the home builder’s fault, the homeowner would have sole control over how the problem is fixed without any incentive for the owner to select economically reasonable options.

If the home builder balks at some outrageous demand? The homeowner can run to court to file a lawsuit, secure in the knowledge that the home builder would be required to pay all of the legal costs if the homeowner is awarded even a single dollar in damages. On the other hand, the home builder never could collect a dime from a buyer, even if the home builder could prove there wasn’t a thing wrong and the lawsuit was filed frivolously as harassment.

“The only people that are going to win out of this process is a bunch of attorneys,’’ Spencer Kamps, lobbyist for the Home Builders Association of Central Arizona, told Capital Media Services. “All’s it’s going to do is cause housing cost to go up and lawyers’ pockets to get bigger.”

Arizona voters can prevent that by rejecting this initiative if it qualifies for the Nov. 4 ballot.