Vincent Liger wanted Limetree Bay Terminals to clean his cistern after the company allegedly sprayed clouds of oil over his home in 2021.
Under a law expediting civil suits by people over 70 or who are terminally ill, Liger was able to get his case heard before similar suits. Limetree, the former owners of St. Croix’s oil refinery, argued the law was unconstitutional. When the Virgin Islands Supreme Court agreed, Limetree’s lawyers filed a motion to force Liger, who still has no drinkable water from his cistern, to pay their legal fees: $44,040.
Limetree’s attorneys charged between $300 and $400 an hour, according to court records. The final bill to overturn the fast-tracking law included hours of analysis, writing and reviewing reports, $560 in document printing, and $1,000 to attend the Supreme Court’s oral arguments in May.
On Aug. 2, the Supreme Court said language in the law gave legislators too much authority over the judicial branch, violating the separation of powers guaranteed in the Revised Organic Act — the territory’s de facto constitution.
Liger, who had nothing to do with crafting or enacting the law, could now be stuck with a $44,040 tab for attempting to follow the law.
Jacob Gower, Liger’s attorney, said the octogenarian Government Employee Retirement System board member was caught in a long-simmering dispute between the judicial and legislative branches.
The judiciary wants to control how it calendars cases but has a lengthy judicial backlog, Gower said. The legislature wants to move court cases alone more quickly but doesn’t have very many tools to do so.
“I guess besides writing bigger checks, giving the judiciary a bigger budget — outside of that, I think the Legislature feels quite hamstrung on how to help the judiciary eliminate that backlog,” he said. “Mr. Liger would bear the burden of that situation.”
As of Tuesday afternoon, the court had not yet ruled on Limetree’s $44,040 request for Liger to pay their legal fees. Gower speculated it might not be about the money but about dissuading others from filing suit by making cases take longer and reap less damages.
“Mr. Liger is not suing for millions, hundreds of thousands, billions of dollars. Right? This is not this is not a large lawsuit. In order to facilitate this case moving quicker, Mr. Liger had already stipulated that his case was not worth more than $75,000. Because if his case is worth more than $75,000, he’s got to go to federal court,” Gower said. “You can do the math there. Even if we went to trial and hit a home run and had a $75,000 case, Mr. Liger has now dropped down to $30,000. It’s a big chunk of the recovery potential. It’s just immediately taken off the table. And I can’t help but to think that there’s some calculation there on Limetree’s part.”
Gower also suggested there was no reason for the matter to go to court at all. Had Limetree simply offered to clean or replace cisterns and otherwise compensate people for their losses and inconvenience, no lawyers or legal fees would have been needed, he said.
“If you want to do it with a licensed, reputable, bonded company, it’s going to run you in the neighborhood of $8,000 to $10,000 — $8,000 to $12,000 for a single cistern,” Gower said. “Limetree could have gone out to every single one of these houses and said, we’re going to drain the water. We’re gonna pressure wash it. We’re going to scrub the cistern walls. We’re going to reseal it back up. And it would have been world cheaper than what they’re doing here.”
