Campbell County landfill case heard by Va. Supreme Court

Campbell County’s appeal of a $9 million verdict rendered against it in a landfill pollution case was argued before the Supreme Court of Virginia Tuesday morning.

The justices seemed less interested in how the jury reached its verdict than they were in a blanket ruling before the 2009 trial that the county was liable under the state’s oil-spill law for polluting the groundwater under an adjacent mobile home park.

Claude and Virginia Royal discovered the pollution at the property near Yellow Branch in 2002. After talks with the county about how to resolve the situation broke down, the couple sued in 2005, asking for $10 million. A jury of county residents awarded most of that in October 2009.

The county appealed the decision last year.

Specifically, the county has challenged Judge Michael Gamble’s ruling before the trial that benzene, one of the pollutants found in the ground water, was “oil” under state law. Timothy Hayes, a private attorney hired to represent the county in its appeal, argued Tuesday that wasn’t the case.

Instead, Hayes argued, the benzene, which can be found in oil, was picked up in another form by rainwater as it leached through the landfill. He said the oil-spill law was meant to cover incidents such as tanker spills where pure liquid oil is dumped into state waterways.

“In this case, the liquid was water,” he said.

On questioning by Chief Justice Cynthia Kinser, Hayes argued the state’s landfill law should have been applied instead, which allows for the discharge of certain chemicals. When Kinser asked why landfills couldn’t be held to both standards, he replied they were mutually exclusive because landfills aren’t designed for the storage of oil.

Monica Monday, the lawyer representing landowners Claude and Virginia Royal, who own the land adjacent to the landfill, differed.

“Their (landfill) permit did not allow them to violate any other law… to injure anyone’s property or person,” Monday told Kinser.

And she noted the county wasn’t in compliance with the landfill law, saying it had been cited by the Department of Environmental Quality in 2003 for problems related to a leaky dump.

The county has further challenged the application of a federal environmental law that allowed the suit to go forward past a state statute of limitations and has stated the damages awarded by the jury were excessive and based on unbelievable testimony that the Royals’ mobile home park no longer had value.

The Royals counter that all of the issues the county has appealed were largely decided before the circuit court trial, meaning they are not suitable for the state’s high court to consider on appeal.

The court’s decision on whether to uphold the verdict, nullify it or send the case back for retrial is expected in early November.

Meanwhile, the county has spent more than $3 million trying to pump and treat the contaminated groundwater near the landfill. Earlier this year, the county agreed to settle a lawsuit against a Richmond engineering firm it hired to monitor the spread of the pollution. The county sued for more than $2 million, but accepted a $700,000 payment.