Campbell County will file a motion this week asking a judge to set aside a jury’s decision last month that granted a $9 million judgment in favor of owners of a mobile home park who had sued the county, administrator David Laurrell said Monday.
Also, Laurrell said the county and the mobile home park owners have reached an agreement that $645,000 is a “reasonable amount” for the county to pay for legal fees and expert witnesses in the case.
The jury had been slated to reconvene last Friday to decide on legal fees, but that proceeding did not occur.
Claude “Butch” and Virginia Royal, who own the 160-acre Twin Oaks park near Yellow Branch, sued the county in 2005 and 2006 after testing in 2002 showed chemicals were leaking from the nearby county landfill into their drinking water.
Circuit Court Judge Michael Gamble ruled in September that the county was responsible for polluting the water. A nine-day civil trial began on Oct. 19 that addressed evidence about the value of that damage.
“We don’t agree that the $9 million is a reasonable amount,” Laurrell said in an interview after Monday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, “so sometime this week the county is going to file a motion in the circuit court asking the judge set aside the verdict of the jury.”
The motion is “the first step in the appeals process, I guess,” Laurrell said.
The October trial came after years of legal wrangling that included multiple parties and assigning the case to an Amherst County judge.
Depending on the outcome, the county could reinstate a third-party lawsuit against the engineering firm that designed the landfill, Laurrell said, but “it hasn’t played itself out far enough yet to know the answer.”
Laurrell said Monday that the jury was dismissed Friday. Clerk of Courts Deborah Hughes said no order dismissing the jury had been sent to her office, but that jurors were not scheduled to return in the case as of Monday afternoon.
During the trial, the Royals’ lawyer said the property and business was worth about $6 million, and the family lost about $1 million holding down rent charges and $2 million from the loss of their use of groundwater.
The county argued that the Royals have clean drinking water on their property and were able to switch tenants to clean wells right after contamination was discovered. The county also argued it offered to provide public water access for years, largely at the county’s expense.
The Royals said the offers were made in exchange for giving up claims against the county.
The agreement over attorney fees effectively caps any final judgment at $9.6 million, Laurrell said. Public records show the county’s reserve fund has about $9.9 million, but much of that is budget savings for anticipated state money shortfalls over the next two years.
Staff writer Chris Dumond contributed.
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