Opinion ID: 2548578
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Cabinet And Frasure Creek Have An Adequate Remedy By Appeal.

Text: Because the trial court is acting within its jurisdiction, the Cabinet and Frasure Creek are generally not entitled to extraordinary relief unless the court is proceeding erroneously, they could not obtain an adequate remedy by appeal, and the denial of relief would result in great injustice or irreparable injury. Cox v. Braden, supra . In particular, where the court is not acting outside its jurisdiction, a showing of no adequate remedy by appeal is `an absolute prerequisite' to obtaining a writ for extraordinary relief. Estate of Cline v. Weddle, 250 S.W.3d 330, 335 (Ky.2008) (quoting from The Independent Order of Foresters v. Chauvin, 175 S.W.3d 610 (Ky. 2005)). If there is an adequate remedy by appeal, the special case exception which dispenses with the showing of great and irreparable harm and allows issuance of a writ to protect the orderly administration of justice, Cox, 266 S.W.3d at 796-97, is not applicable for a very obvious reason  the availability of an appeal adequately serves the interest of orderly judicial administration. Here, the Cabinet and Frasure Creek maintain that the trial court has erred in a couple of ways. First, they accuse the court of misapplying CR 24.03, which requires a person seeking to intervene as of right to serve a motion and an accompanying pleading upon the parties already in the case. The Citizen Plaintiffs' pleading does not satisfy the rule, according to the Cabinet and Frasure Creek, and thus the intervention is procedurally improper. The Cabinet and Frasure Creek also maintain that by allowing the intervention the trial court has implicitly adopted an inappropriate standard for reviewing and approving their proposed consent judgment. Are these alleged errors subject to remedy by appeal? We believe they are. Our own precedent does not seem to have addressed the precise procedural issue, but our predecessor court characterized an order allowing intervention as interlocutory. Webster v. Board of Education of Walton-Verona Independent School District, 437 S.W.2d 956, 957 (Ky.1969). This is consistent with the general rule elsewhere, a sound one we believe, to the effect that an order granting intervention (unlike an order denying it Ashland Public Library Board of Trustees v. Scott, 610 S.W.2d 895 (Ky.1981)) is not subject to immediate review but is to be addressed in the appeal from the final judgment. See generally E.H. Schopler, Appealability of Order Granting or Denying Right of Intervention, 15 A.L.R.2d 336 (1951-2012). Merely adding a party to the suit, after all, generally at least, will not deprive any other party of the ability to assert and vindicate his or her rights in the ordinary course of trial and appeal. Similarly, whether the trial court must find before entering it that the consent judgment is fair, adequate, reasonable, and consistent with the public interest  the standard typically employed by the federal courts when asked to enter environmental consent decrees, see, e.g., United States v. Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government, 591 F.3d 484 (6th Cir.2010), and the standard the Cabinet and Frasure Creek themselves invoked within their proposed consent judgment  or whether some other standard is the appropriate one under Kentucky law, are questions best left to the trial court in the first instance. If and when the trial court applies the wrong standard and does so to the detriment of the Cabinet and Frasure Creek, they can have the error corrected on appeal and they will be out no more than the costs of litigation, which, as the Court of Appeals correctly noted and as we have many times held, does not render the remedy by appeal inadequate. Sunbeam Corporation v. Dortch, 313 S.W.3d 114 (Ky.2010) (citing Estate of Cline, supra ). Against this conclusion, the Cabinet and Frasure Creek insist that more is at stake here than the ordinary costs of litigation. Relying on North Fork Collieries, LLC v. Hall, 322 S.W.3d 98 (Ky.2010), they maintain that the Citizen Plaintiffs' intervention deprives them of their bargained-for right not to be forced into litigation. In North Fork, one party to an arbitration agreement brought suit against the other party, and the defending party moved the trial court to stay the suit and to refer the matter to an arbitrator. When the trial court refused, the defending party sought interlocutory relief pursuant to CR 65. Granting that relief, we explained that in those circumstances an appeal would not be an adequate remedy, because the allegedly breached bargain to arbitrate instead of litigating could not be vindicated after the litigation had occurred. The Cabinet and Frasure Creek contend that they, similarly, are losing the benefit of their agreement to settle rather than to litigate the Cabinet's enforcement action, a benefit that an appeal cannot restore. This reliance on North Fork is misplaced. North Fork concerned an arbitration contract signed by and binding on the plaintiff in a lawsuit, a plaintiff who had ignored his agreement not to sue. Here, however, even assuming that the yet-to-be entered consent judgment constitutes a binding agreement between the Cabinet and Frasure Creek, it obviously does not bind the Citizen Plaintiffs, who are not parties to it. The Cabinet and Frasure Creek could and apparently did agree not to litigate against each other; they could not agree, however, not to be proceeded against by third parties. This case is thus unlike North Fork, which hinged on the fact that by bringing suit the plaintiff allegedly breached the arbitration agreement to which he was a party, a breach that could not be remedied if the litigation were allowed to go forward. Since the Citizen Plaintiffs are strangers to the Cabinet and Frasure Creek's agreement, their intervention cannot be a breach of that agreement and does not threaten to deprive either the Cabinet or Frasure Creek of any benefit within its contemplation. Nor does the Citizen Plaintiffs' intervention force the Cabinet and Frasure Creek into unwanted-litigation with each other. They remain free to stand by their settlement. Finally, the Cabinet and Frasure Creek suggest that broader public-policy concerns give them interests that cannot be vindicated by an ordinary appeal. The Cabinet complains that the Citizen Plaintiffs' intervention interferes with its right to settle disputes through negotiation and compromise. Frasure Creek speculates that subjecting proposed settlements to a citizen plaintiffs critique will eliminate a regulated entity's incentive to settle. These are valid concerns, of course, but allowing the litigation to proceed in the normal course does not undermine them. If the Citizen Plaintiffs' intervention is contrary to state law, as the Cabinet and Frasure Creek assert, and results in the rejection of the proposed consent judgment, the ordinary remedy of an appeal, after the development of a full record, will fully vindicate those asserted policy interests. Thus, whether the consent judgment is accepted  in which case the Cabinet's and Frasure Creek's interests in the settlement will not have been interfered with  or rejected  in which case an appeal will be available  the only loss to them will be the cost of the litigation, and that loss, as noted, does not make an appeal after finality an inadequate remedy.