Environmental Lawsuits: Follow The Money

I made a mistake in last week's blog when I said the tax-exempt environmental industry collected $4.7 billion dollars between 2004 and 2007 using the Equal Access to Justice Act. The funds were paid by the "Judgment Fund." My fault for quoting a secondary source. An alert reader sent a more original source document, a research memo from the Budd-Falen Law Offices LLC dated September 29, 2009, digging into attorney fees paid by the federal government to plaintiffs who prevail or reach a settlement in lawsuits or appeals. The memo lists 937 lawsuits filed by three of the most active environmental industry corporations* for the years 2000 to 2009, then goes on to state: One source of funding is called the "Judgment Fund." The Judgment Fund is a Congressional line-item appropriation and is used for Endangered Species Act cases, Clean Water Act cases, and with other statutes that directly allow a plaintiff to recover attorney fees. There is no central data base for tracking the payment of these fees, thus neither the taxpayers, members of Congress nor the federal government knows the total amount of taxpayer dollars spent from the Judgment Fund on individual cases. The only information regarding these fees that is available is: The memo goes on to detail statistics for the years 2003 thru 2007 by listing the number of payments and total dollars, then continues with the following: In total, $4,716,264,730.00 (that is billion with a "b") in total payments were paid in taxpayer dollars from the Judgment Fund from 2003 through July 2007 for attorney fees and costs in cases against the federal government. A careful reading of the memo indicates the researcher was not able to determine to whom the $4.7 billion was paid (i.e. whether the plaintiffs were environmental or non-environmental groups) since no system is in place to provide transparency and tracking of the funds...read more