They were greeted as heroes, potential saviors who arrived on the doorsteps of a community searching for answers and desperate for help.
Five attorneys — Suzette Bagneris, Joe Bruno, Linda Harang, George Roux and Stephen Murray – had joined to take up the case of a neighborhood built on top of a toxic waste dump. They would spend the next two decades locked in a legal battle with the the city, the Housing Authority of New Orleans and the Orleans Parish School Board over who was responsible for putting families in the middle of what had become a Superfund site.
They scored their first significant victory in 2006, when then-Orleans Civil District Court Judge Nadine Ramsey found all three political entities, and four former insurers of HANO, liable for the consequences of building two residential communities — Press Park and Gordon Plaza — and Moton Elementary School on top of the Agriculture Street Landfill.
The courts ordered the four insurance companies to pay the residents $14.2 million for emotional distress and property damage. And in January, after the appeals process had been exhausted, letters were sent out informing each person in the class action suit how much money he or she would receive.
Bruno described the ruling as “extraordinary” and the result of a “gargantuan effort”
on the part of the legal team.
The residents of Press Park and Gordon Plaza, however, don’t share the enthusiasm. Many now see the attorneys as the enemy. They accuse their legal representatives of getting rich off the shattered remains of their lives and the corpses of their departed loved ones.
The main point of contention is the fees awarded to the attorneys by Civil District Court Judge Tiffany Chase. Roughly half of the $14.2 million settlement was given to the five lawyers and a court-appointed administrator, leaving roughly $7 million to be divided between more than 5,000 residents, resulting in an average settlement of a few hundred dollars per person.
The residents also blame the lawyers for failing to force the city to buy out homeowners or relocate them, as many have demanded since the Environmental Protection Agency declared the community a Superfund site in 1994.
“The attorneys don’t have to work another day in their lives and I can see why. They’re walking away with (millions),” said Gordon Plaza resident Shannon Rainey. “But with what we’re getting, I can’t even finish my fence with that.”
HANO and the school board declined to comment citing the ongoing litigation. The Landrieu administration emailed the following statement: “The City has made and will continue to make efforts to resolve this litigation.”
The lawyers say they did all they could, given the circumstances. The city and its related political entities are protected by the state Constitution from having their assets seized, rendering judgments against them unenforceable.
The only money available was through HANO’s insurance companies and the coverage they provided was limited. The $14.2 million was the best-case scenario, Bruno said.
“Nobody in our group says this is a lot of money,” he said. “This is bull—- money. We’re p—– off about it. We’re mad. But we have to live within the framework of the law. It’s not likely they’ll ever be paid more. But we’ll keep pushing. I’m not going to give up the ship.”
As for their attorneys’ fees, Bruno said he is not ashamed to discuss the subject. In typical cases, the fees paid to lawyers amount to 40 percent of the judgment, plus court costs, he said. But Bruno said his team agreed to take 34.5 percent in fees and 5.4 percent in costs for a total of 40 percent. That amounts to $5.7 million combined for the five attorneys.
The court also set aside 10 percent of the judgment to pay for its own administrative expenses that include the appointment of special master Paul Valteau, who was in charge of calculating and dispersing the settlements. That amounts to $1.4 million leaving a total of $7.1 million to be split between the 5,000 residents.
During a February hearing, Chase told the assembled residents of Press Park and Gordon Plaza that while they may disagree with the amount paid to the attorneys, the legal team spent hundreds of thousands of dollars fighting the case and worked more than they probably realized.
Bagneris, who was the first attorney signed onto the case, said she put in 21 years worth of work, logging more than 15,000 hours. She was also the primary point of contact for the community. As a result, she became the main outlet for the residents’ anger and endured withering criticism as the years dragged on and frustrations mounted, she said.
Accusations that she doesn’t care about the community or that she was trying to take advantage of the people to make a quick buck were especially hurtful, Bagneris said, because of her personal ties to the neighborhood. Her husband, Emile Bagneris, grew up in Gordon Plaza.
“My husband hasn’t had any health issues but you live in fear of it, particularly when
you’re hearing stories about people dying every day,” she said. “I understand the frustration. I completely get it. I’m frustrated too. But I think people forget that their legal advocates are also human beings who have families. It gets rough sometimes. I know I have done everything I could have possibly done. I’ve dedicated 21 years of my life to this battle, every day for 21 years.”
Bagneris said the lawyers tried to convince former Mayor Marc Morial to relocate the families but while he supported the idea publicly, behind the scenes his administration refused to pay a dime to make it happen.
The Environmental Protection Agency at the time said that the landfill didn’t pose a significant enough “immediate” health risk to the residents to justify the federal government paying for an entire relocation. If the city wanted to move the people living on the site, it would need to share the costs since it was responsible for building housing on a toxic landfill, EPA officials said at the time.
Bagneris chalks up Morial’s refusal to pay relocation costs to pride.
“This was built during the Dutch Morial administration,” she said. “This was something (Marc Morial’s) dad took pride in and it was the right idea, trying to provide homes to low-income people and homeownership opportunities. So for (Marc Morial) to come back and say this was a mistake and we should relocate these people, I think pride prevented him from doing that.” And for current Mayor Mitch Landrieu, “he’s probably thinking, ‘Why do I have to deal with this mess?’ But somebody needs to step up,” she said.
Morial, in an emailed response, said he “personally traveled” to meet with former EPA administrator Carol Browner to try to persuade the federal government to pay for the relocation of the community.
“My meeting with Ms. Browner was contentious as I fought for the residents who wished to be relocated,” Morial said. Bagneris “must be engaging in idle speculation, lack direct knowledge, or have a Pinocchio problem.”
In Ramsey’s 2006 ruling, however, the judge appeared to side with Bagneris’ version of events. She wrote that Sheriff Marlin Gusman, who served as the city’s chief administrative officer from 1994 to 2000, stated in sworn testimony that “even though the mayor opposed the remediation in favor of relocation, the city did not set aside funding within its annual budget to address the environmental concerns of the ASL residents. The city did not undertake efforts to determine whether there was any real estate that the city owned that it could use to relocate the residents.”
That’s where the focus of the residents’ anger should be, Bagneris said, on the elected officials who failed them every step of the way, not on the attorneys who spent decades fighting to make things right.
“The government built this neighborhood. It put these people there. Then the government discovered the problem and the government left them there and continues to leave them there,” Bagneris said. “I don’t think this should happen to Americans. I know it doesn’t happen in other parts of the country, but it seems to happen here. It’s a shame. This has been a very emotional case for me and for anyone to say I did not fight my heart out for this community is just wrong.”