- Class Actions
PRELIMINARY APPROVAL of $2.3 MILLION SETTLEMENT FOR PUBLIC HOUSING TENANTS
Preliminary approval of $2.3 million settlement for public housing tenants was granted on June 9, 2006 by Third Circuit Court in Smith v. Housing and Community Development Corporation of Hawaii, Civ. No. 04-1-0069K. After Judge Elizabeth Strance certified a state-wide plaintiff class consisting of tenants residing in public housing between May 1, 2002 and August 31, 2004 who paid their own utilities, the parties entered into an agreement to settle all claims. Class counsel are AHFI's Shelby Anne Floyd, and Gavin Thornton of Lawyers for Equal Justice.
CLASS ACTION CERTIFIED IN LANDOWNERS’ CASE
AGAINST THE STATE OF HAWAI`I FOR TAKING
OCEANFRONT LAND
The Hawai`i First Circuit Court recently granted class action status to a lawsuit filed by several beachfront landowners against the State of Hawai`i. The lawsuit seeks an injunction and damages against the State for taking their oceanfront land without compensation in violation of the Hawai`i Constitution.
In 2003, a law was enacted forbidding private beachfront owners from asserting their rights to land that forms through accretion, which is the process by which new land is formed gradually from the sea. The 2003 law reversed longstanding rules – dating back more than 115 years – under which oceanfront accretion belonged to the abutting landowner, not the Kingdom, the Territory, or the State.
The lawsuit asks the Court to rule that the 2003 law unlawfully takes private property without payment of just compensation, and that the State must either repeal the new law or pay shoreline owners for taking their property rights.
Proceeding as a class action ensures that all beachfront landowners will benefit from the lawsuit. It is estimated that there are more than 20,000 landowners in the class.
The lawsuit does not challenge or affect environmental or other laws which regulate beachfront landowners' use of their property. Nor does it affect the public’s right to enjoy the public beach below the vegetation line or the debris line.
Paul Alston, counsel for the class, said:
The State tried to steal beachfront land worth tens of millions of dollars through an obscure law, instead of confronting the issue openly and fulfilling its constitutional duty to pay just compensation. Public beach ownership is a great thing, but the State's rights cannot be expanded by an illegal land grab. An earlier version of this law was vetoed because of concerns about its illegality; that was a warning to the State that it was doing wrong. We expect the Court will fully protect the landowners' rights.
DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION FOUND TO HAVE
CHEATED SUBSTITUTE TEACHERS
The Hawai`i First Circuit Court recently granted summary judgment to a class of more than 10,000 substitute teachers who sued to recover back pay from the Department of Education.
The substitutes claimed that the DOE had underpaid them from July 1996 through June 2005 by ignoring a statute that linked their pay to the salaries negotiated through collective bargaining for members of the Hawai`i State Teachers Association. Instead of applying the controlling statute, the DOE fabricated special pay scales for substitute teachers.
Each day, the DOE employs more than 1,000 substitute teachers in schools throughout the State. The DOE depends upon the substitutes to provide essential services to students. The scheme to underpay them appears to have been motivated by the fact that substitute teachers are not unionized and the HSTA believed that higher pay for substitutes meant lower pay for HSTA members. In 1997 and in 2004 the HSTA collaborated with the DOE in the underpayment scheme.
The DOE claimed that substitute teachers were entitled to no relief because the state was immune from liability, because the substitute teachers were misreading the law, and because the substitute teachers had waived any right to additional pay by accepting lower pay, regardless what the law required.
The Court rejected all of the DOE’s arguments regarding the merits of the case, but found that the statute of limitations barred claims for back pay before November 8, 2000.
The teachers’ damages are estimated to be more than $20 million, not including their attorneys fees and costs. The Court is expected to enter judgment in the substitutes’ favor in February or March 2005.
Paul Alston, Bruce Wakuzawa, and Mei-Fei Kuo represented the substitute teachers
