The Louisiana Supreme Court has refused to take up Baton Rouge landman Dan Collins’ long-running environmental whistleblower case against the state Department of Natural Resources, effectively ending the 10-year legal battle over dredging in the Atchafalaya Basin.
Collins had hoped the state’s high court would reverse an April ruling from the First Circuit Court of Appeals that overturned a $750,000 judgment Collins won against the state at a 2015 trial. But the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the case means the appellate court decision will stand.
“It’s sad,” says attorney Jill Craft, whose firm represents Collins. “This ends it. Years of litigation and it’s over.”
Collins’ fight with the state dates back to the early 2000s, when he was working as a landman for DNR. He claims he discovered that a dredging project in the Atchafalaya Basin ostensibly done to improve water quality was actually completed to facilitate oil and gas drilling on water bottoms that belonged to several politically connected landowners.
When Collins brought his findings of what he thought were environmental law violations to his superiors at DNR, he says his contracts with the state dried up, which was the basis for his original lawsuit.
The state denied that Collins lost any work for “blowing the whistle” on a project it continues to maintain was legitimately done for environmental purposes. The state also challenged Collins’ standing to sue under the whistleblower statute, claiming he was not a state employee but an independent contractor.
Though the jury at Collins’ trial unanimously determined the landman was an employee, a three-judge appellate panel in April reversed the jury’s findings and threw out the case. Now, the Supreme Court has settled the issue for good.
“The jury found he was an employee and found what had happened was a violation of the law,” Craft says. “The jury resoundingly found that is what happened. The sad part of the situation is that no other body has taken an interest whatsoever in fixing it, and that’s terrible.”
—Stephanie Riegel
