Orange County Water District North Basis and South Basis Lawsuits.
Andrew Galvin, in a comprehensive article in the September 6, 2013 edition of The Orange County Register, details the Orange County Water District’s lawsuits–called the “north basin” suit and “south basin” suits–brought to obtain money to remediate contamination in certain groundwater acquifers in Orange County.
To say the least, it has garnered some costs/fee exposure for the Water District. In the north basin case previously last fall, Orange County Superior Court Judge Kim Dunning found against the District, refusing to award it costs of investigation. More recently, Orange County Superior Court Judge Nancy Wieben Stock ruled that the Water District’s claims against seven of the defendants lacked support in the “south basin” case. That leaves those defendants free to have court costs reimbursed by the district, which likely will be in the millions of dollars.
As an example, defendant Gallade Chemical (of Santa Ana), after building a state of the art remediation system, then had to spent $100,000-$125,000 per month on attorney’s fees and other costs to fight the Water District suit. Gallade’s CEO lamented that the fees and costs had to be spent in the suit rather than used to remediate any contamination issues.
Perdue/Eastern Shore Farmers Denied Fee/Costs Reimbursement Request in Clean Water Act Poultry Pollution Suit.
Waterkeeper Alliance, a citizens’ group, brought a Clean Water Act suit against poultry producer Perdue and Eastern Shore farmers (Perdue contract farmers/growers, whose court fees and costs were paid by SaveFarm Families.org, a Perdue-supported group). The contract farmers maintained two poultry houses having drainage ditches which drained to a Chesapeake Bay tributary. Plaintiff lost the suit because the judge was not convinced that growers’ poultry house ditches polluted the Chesapeake Bay tributary. Rather than the pollution originating from the Perdue contract growers’ two poultry houses, he seemed convinced that the pollution came from the growers’ herd of cows not involved in the poultry suit or subject to regulation at the time.
Perdue and its growers, buoyed by the judge’s comments that the matter was not prosecuted particularly well and should have been settled rather than litigated to the end, filed petitions to be reimbursed for more than $3 million in fees and costs ($2.5 million comprising fees of the total amount), with the judge only granting $28,000 in costs against the losing plaintiff. He found that the case was not frivolous, but still bemoaned the expenditure of resources by both sides.
SaveFarmFamilies.org, which raised nearly $400,000 in the contract growers’ defense, will be seeking reimbursement of up to $300,000 from the State of Maryland based upon recent legislation emanating from farmers/rural lawmakers’ complaints about the state-funded Maryland law school’s role in pursuing the case. Here is one colorful comment from the contract growers’ lawyer seeking to recoup some of the moneys for contributors of SaveFarmFamilies: “All the people down on the Shore who attended chicken dinners and wrote checks . . . ought to be able to recoup that.” Re – coop?
Quite a flap–ouch, sorry for the pun!