Radioactive landfill suit no longer ‘local controversy,’ 8th Circuit rules

A lawsuit involving a radioactive landfill near St. Louis will remain in federal court, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled July 8.

The West Lake Landfill in Bridgeton contains radioactive soil that was dumped there in 1973 and is connected to the World War II-era Manhattan Project. Nearby landowners filed a class-action lawsuit against the landfill’s owners and operators in 2018.

After the suit was filed in St. Louis County Circuit Court, the only Missouri-based company named as a defendant, Rock Road Industries Inc., merged into Bridgeton Landfill LLC. The defendants removed it to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri.

The district judge remanded it to state court under the “local-controversy exception” to the federal Class Action Fairness Act. That exception requires, among other things, that there be a local defendant whose alleged conduct “forms a significant basis” for the suit’s claims.

The 8th Circuit, however, said the allegations against Rock Road were essentially the same as those against the other defendants. Such a “cut-and-paste approach” didn’t meaningfully differentiate Rock Road’s conduct, Judge Raymond W. Gruender wrote. Judge Duane Benton concurred. 

Judge David R. Stras also agreed but wrote separately to argue that it was enough that Rock Road no longer existed as a separate Missouri-based entity at the time the case was removed.

“Without a local defendant, there is no local controversy, so I agree that this case must remain in federal court,” he wrote.

The case is Kitchin v. Bridgeton Landfill LLC, 19-2072.