Opinion ID: 2638232
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Summary of Proceedings in the Superior Court

Text: After remand from Old Harbor I and before trial, the parties stipulated to several facts, including the following: No oil from the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill contacted AJV land on or before March 31, 1989, because the oil had not yet reached the Kodiak Island Group. For the AJV lands that were oiled, the vast amount of the oil was not present by the end of the summer of 1990. During a bench trial before Superior Court Judge Sen K. Tan, the parties presented live testimony from ten witnesses, and submitted depositions from eight witnesses, and introduced approximately 370 exhibits. The superior court found that the Joint Venture members held the land as tenants in common. The superior court also relied upon our observation in Old Harbor I that, although the Corporations ceased to be members of the Joint Venture upon notice of withdrawal, they continued to own interests in Joint Venture land and other assets. [17] The superior court found that, although the parties did not think about the [Exxon] claim in the context of the partition discussions and the documents that finalized their agreement, they were certainly aware of a potential oil spill damage claim during the period between withdrawal and partition. The court also found that the parties knew that the Joint Venture was an absent class member in the Exxon suit, although the parties dispute whether the Joint Venture found out about its class membership before partition. [18] Finally, the court found that within a year of the Corporations' withdrawal, the Afognak Native Corporation (whose managers were the same people managing the Joint Venture) demonstrated that it felt its own land damage claim had value by participating in discovery with other class attorneys and modifying its direct action claims against Exxon to include damages for the direct oiling of its land. (The Afognak Native Corporation had originally claimed damage only to archaeological sites during oil-spill cleanup.) The superior court noted that [t]he [Exxon] oil spill case extended the notions of damages that could be recovered. This was because land owners such as the Joint Venture were not required to show actual damage. Under the distribution plans of both the Alyeska and Exxon settlements, a claimant's land was valued on the day of the oil spill (March 24, 1989), and its value before the spill was compared to its value after the spill on that day. Using March 24 as the date for assessing damage was simply a convenience, since any distribution plan tying recoveries to when a property was actually first oiled would have been an administrative nightmare. Additionally, a landowner did not have to show that its land had actually been oiled; the land only had to be located within the oil spill area, which included all of Afognak Island. [19] Thus a landowner claim such as the Joint Venture's had only two elements: ownership of the land on March 24, 1989 and location in the oil spill area. The superior court applied the three-part mistake of fact test set out in Old Harbor I, and concluded that the parties made a mutual mistake of fact in not realizing . . . the existence of the oil spill damages claim [during the partition negotiations]. Holding that this mistake merited reformation of the settlement agreement, the superior court awarded 18.37% of the Exxon claim to the Corporations. In light of this ruling, the superior court did not reach the issue of breach of fiduciary duty. The Joint Venture now appeals.