VELCO seeks new trial

A Vermont utility recently ordered by a Rutland jury to pay $1 million to a former Wells family is asking the judge who presided over the case to override the verdict or grant a new trial.Less than two weeks after jurors awarded Olga Julinska and Sergei Kniazev $100,000 in compensation and $900,000 in punitive damages, the Vermont Electric Power Co., or VELCO, filed a motion in Rutland civil court to overturn the verdict because the central issue should have been decided by a judge, not a jury.

During the course of a five-day trial, jurors heard about a new communications tower the utility built on an easement next to the home where the couple and their four children lived atop Northeast Mountain in Wells.

While a radio tower already stood on the site when the couple paid $390,000 for the home in 2007 — and had stood there since the 1980s — the new tower installed by VELCO in fall 2012 was wider and had the capacity to emanate what the family argued were dangerous levels of microwaves.

In addition, the certificate of public good granted to VELCO by the state Public Service Board allowed the utility around-the-clock access to the family’s home.

During the trial, the family argued that VELCO had rendered their property worthless and uninhabitable — the Russian immigrants and their children left the home and moved to Boston before construction on the new tower began.

VELCO argued that the new tower wasn’t much different than the old one in terms of its dimensions or impact on the rest of the property. The utility argued that $25,000 was fair compensation for its use of the property.

In the motion for a new trial or amended judgment, Burlington attorney David Boyd, representing VELCO, argued that Judge William Cohen should have decided issues surrounding the easement and that the case didn’t belong in front of a jury.

“The Vermont Supreme Court recently affirmed the interpretation of ‘the scope of [an] easement as a matter of law’ rejecting an argument that the (lower) court ‘should instead have submitted it to the jury,’” Boyd wrote.

Boyd also argued that jurors were given confusing instructions before they deliberated. In particular, he said, it wasn’t made clear to the jury that the dimensions of the easement and almost all of the allowed uses it granted were in place when the couple bought the property. At that time, the easement and an older radio tower were under private ownership.

VELCO bought the tower and the easement in 2009.

VELCO Vice President Kerrick Johnson said this week the utility wants to reargue its points to Cohen and may appeal to the Vermont Supreme Court.

“It’s not so much an argument we’re raising with the jury as it is a matter of law and the scope of the inquiry and what the jury was allowed to consider,” Johnson said.

While VELCO did expand the existing easement through the use of eminent domain, Johnson said the 400 square feet of land taken through that process didn’t change the rights granted through the old easement regarding microwave communications or access to the property.

The Manchester attorney representing the family said he would soon file an objection to the utility’s new request.

“We’ll respond the same way we did during the trial,” Robert Woolmington said. “The judge rejected this same argument before the trial and during it. We expect he’ll reject this one too.”

Reached by phone this week, Julinska said the utility’s latest motion wasn’t a surprise but was a disappointment.

“They’ve been so heavy-handed all along that I didn’t expect them to accept things, but I do think it’s arrogant to say the jury didn’t know what it was doing when it made it’s decision,” she said. “They heard all about the easements for five days and both sides presented their case very clearly.”

“We’re committed to fighting this thing to the end,” she added.

It’s curious to see VELCO, a private corporation worth over a billion dollars, lament over a jury’s decision on a compensation award due from condemning our property in Wells. VELCO now threatens to pass its cost of this legal dispute over to the ratepayers and invites everyone’s indignation at this outcome. It seems that VELCO is implying that it’s either the jury’s or the landowners’ fault that the electric customers may be on the hook for these extraordinary expenses.

Similarly, VELCO’s lawyers spent the entire trial insinuating we were to blame for this condemnation because we just wouldn’t hand over our rights. VELCO’s idea of a “collaborative process” is the landowner agreeing to everything VELCO says.

We never wanted their project on our mountaintop. All we wanted was to be left in peace. Instead, we had to engage in four legal proceedings and now may be facing a fifth – VELCO’s appeal of the jury’s decision. While VELCO can pass its costs to someone else and will do so, what about us? What about other landowners whose properties are being destroyed by utility projects? How are they supposed to finance years of legal struggle that they are unwillingly sucked into?

There is a wide disconnect between how the utilities view the impacts of their projects and what those impacts really are. The jury’s award last week was 40 times greater than what VELCO self-elected to pay for the property rights it extracted by force from us with the help of the state. That speaks for itself. It’s time for the utilities to realize that in addition to being good stewards of ratepayers’ dollars they must also be fair to the landowners whose properties make it possible for them to serve the public in the first place and make that 10 percent a year profit. Without those landowners there’d be no VELCO. We hope that VELCO’s new CEO, Thomas Dunn, starting on the job this month, will learn a valuable lesson from this case and change the way they are conducting business.

Couple forced from Vt. mountaintop property by construction of utility tower gets $1 million