Two Wrongs Do Not Make A Right
Two Wrongs Do Not Make A Right
By: Leigh Anne Evensky
Edited by: Brooke E. Michiels
In re Horizon, 2016 U.S. App. LEXIS 3400; 2016 WL 759890 (5th Cir. La. Feb. 25, 2016)
The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit was firm in a recent decision upholding the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana’s denial of a Motion for Authority to File Wetlands Claims pursuant to a court-supervised settlement agreement in regards to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.A settlement agreement formulated for a class of parties harmed by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, discussed in detail in In re Deepwater Horizon, 739 F.3d 790 (5th Cir. 2013), provides compensation to owners of Louisiana property within the “Wetlands Real Property Claim Zone” (Claim Zone). A landowner seeking compensation must provide an on-line claim form specific to the Claim Zone that requires: (1) his property is within the Claim Zone, (2) a tax assessment, and (3) a copy of the deed for the land in the Claim Zone. The on-line portal used to screen the claims filters the claims through the best data available, but as stated in the settlement agreement is not always 100% accurate. Therefore, if the on-line portal states that the land is not within the Claim Zone, the claimant may document actual presence of the land in the Claim Zone to the claims administrator and receive compensation. All parcels of land within the Claim Zone regardless of the presence of oil receive compensation, and some parcels outside the Claim Zone will receive compensation if the presence of oil is documented. Furthermore, once a class member is compensated on a claim, that class member has six months to submit any and all additional claims. Policy 251 provides relief to the six-month limitation on new claims by allowing the claimant to file a request for relief within 60 days of the six-month deadline. This relief will be granted only upon the showing of “excusable neglect under Fed. R. Civ. P. 60(b).”The claimants in this case filed on-line claims for seven parcels of land and were only compensated for one of the parcels. The on-line screening portal only showed two of the seven parcels to be within the Claim Zone, and the claimants made no further effort to establish the five remaining parcels were within the Claim Zone. Around seven months after the six-month deadline to submit additional claims, the claimants attempted to submit two more claims associated with one of the five parcels of land that were not considered to be in the Claim Zone. The claimants knew they had missed the six-month deadline and the 60-day deadline to relieve the original deadline, so the claimants called upon the district court to invoke its supervisory authority over the settlement agreement and allow the claimants to file their claims late. The claimants wanted the court to either (1) determine that the two claims at question had been submitted in July 2012 with the rest of the claims, or in the alternative (2) excuse the missed six-month deadline and allow them to file the claims.The court rejected both alternatives. The reasoning behind this rejection was that the claimants should have followed the submission procedure and been diligent in their timing. The deadlines were very strict and easy to understand. The claimants put forth a last argument that as the on-line portal simply rejected the parcels and did not instead make a final determination of their claims, they were denied due process of the law. The court responded, “the enforcement of a properly noticed deadline generally does not effect a due process violation.” With that, the court affirmed the district court’s order denying the claimant’s Motion for Authority to File Wetlands Claims.
