Judge Says Neighbors Cannot Join Dunes Suit

A Ventura County Superior Court judge denied permission Wednesday for more landowners to join a lawsuit over the toxic waste dump buried beneath their homes at Oxnard Dunes, opening the door to more lawsuits in one of the county’s most tangled civil cases.

Judge Kenneth Yegan denied a motion by 175 landowners and residents already involved in the suit to bring their neighbors at the Oxnard Dunes subdivision into the 3 1/2-year legal action.

The suit seeks damages from 125 defendants, including the land’s previous owners, oil companies and landfill operators.

Yegan denied the request to add more landowners to the suit, explaining that attorneys failed to identify all current and proposed parties by name on the motion, as required by Judge Joe D. Hadden last October.

Yegan said the lawsuit has been through several judges and has surfaced in his courtroom several times. He remembered hearing the suit last year before it was bounced to Judge Hadden. “Since then I’ve divorced I don’t know how many hundreds of people,” Yegan said.

He told a few Oxnard Dunes residents and nine attorneys present Wednesday that the case surely will be handed off to Judge Robert Soares in July when Soares takes over Yegan’s civil caseload. At that time, Yegan will be transferred to criminal court.

After the hearing Wednesday, plaintiffs’ attorney Conrad Tuohey predicted that Yegan’s ruling will force the landowners who cannot join the suit to file lawsuits of their own, further complicating an already Byzantine case.

The Oxnard Dunes subdivision was built on 11 1/2 acres divided into 100 lots. About 140 people live in its houses and apartment buildings. The subdivision is a mile and a half north of Channel Islands Harbor.

A routine soil test by a Camarillo contractor in 1985 revealed a “gasoline-like odor.” Later tests confirmed that the site was a dumping ground for oil waste, pesticides, cyanide and the carcinogenic chemicals benzene, xylene and toluene.

Nearly three years ago, the site qualified for federal Superfund cleanup money. But cleanup has yet to begin.

The Department of Health Services has postponed hearings on cleanup plans seven times in seven months, Tuohey said. And the plaintiffs are growing more and more irritated with the lack of progress.

“The unfortunate thing is it’s going to create a third wave of lawsuits,” said Oxnard Dunes homeowner Paul Dolan, whose name leads the list of plaintiffs.

Engineers from the Department of Health Services “have been out there punching holes in the ground for the last four years,” Dolan said.

“We’ve never seen anything from them. The Department of Health Services is a useless agency,” he said. “The people in that subdivision live on top of the dump, not across the street from it or next door to it.”

Tuohey said the city of Oxnard has rezoned Oxnard Dunes for higher density, further complicating the task of identifying all the potential plaintiffs who could join the suit.

“It’s a rabbit warren,” Tuohey said. The plaintiffs can invite additional landowners to join the suit only if they all agree to whatever cleanup plan the Department of Health Services devises, he said.

Oxnard has imposed a building moratorium on 43 of the lots. Some banks have stopped issuing loans for construction at Oxnard Dunes.

Adding another layer of legal claims to the suit, the landowners have stopped making mortgage payments to lending institutions, Dolan said.

On Monday, several lenders will join the suit to lay claim to the unpaid balance of their loans, Tuohey said.