Golf course owner must pay despite damage by the state ; Liability dispute after bulldozer fighting fire damages pump system

ST. AUGUSTINE | Mike Pullen heard the state's answer this month about paying for damage a state worker caused at his business.

Understanding it was another matter.

"Our investigation has shown that the damage ... was caused by an employee of Florida Forest [Service] hitting your property with a bulldozer," read the top of a letter to Pullen, owner of the St. Augustine Shores Golf Club, from Florida's risk management division.

It concluded a page later: "We must respectfully deny your claim, and we decline to make any voluntary offers or payments at this time."

The sentences in between explained part of Florida's sovereign immunity laws, the rules that keep taxpayers from paying for every mistake state employees make.

The subject fires up people on all sides of liability disputes: the ones who've been harmed; the budget hawks; the lawmakers who scuffle year after year over special relief bills to get cash for victims of egregious acts that left people injured for life.

When the state's rules were used to answer Pullen - who spent roughly $9,000 fixing a pump system to water his golf course after a bulldozer ripped its power source from the ground - they were greeted like a cop-out.

"They acknowledge that they did it," he said after being told by phone his claim was denied. "But they're hiding behind the sovereign immunity or indemnity."

Whether the state should pay for the repairs is legally murky, and probably depends on factors specific to that situation, said Darryl C. Wilson, a professor at Stetson University College of Law.

No agency is liable if employees do something essential to their job - for example, if firefighters break open a wall to extinguish a fire burning inside the wall. But if the damage was clearly avoidable, and state workers were obviously negligent, the state could have more liability than it first admits.

"When they send someone out to act on behalf of the state, the state is always going to say 'sovereign immunity' first," Wilson said. "Sovereign immunity is waived in many cases."ELECTRIC BOX HIT

Of course, no one started out focused on a legal fight.

In early June, there were lightning strikes all around St. Johns County, including some that started woods fires, said Gary Carpenter, an area supervisor for the Florida Forest Service. After one of those strikes, forest firefighters were sent to the area around the golf course, off U.S. 1 a little south of St. Augustine. (There is disagreement about a basic fact here. Pullen says there was no fire. Carpenter says there definitely was but it stretched no more than 50 feet either way.)

Carpenter said the forest crew left that night because they couldn't get big equipment through a cluster of houses and trees near the course, and because the fire there was small and barely moving while there were others burning elsewhere that needed attention elsewhere. They returned the next day, Carpenter said.

Firefighters plotted a route to bring the bulldozer to the fire without crushing sidewalks or buried pipes or other things that were breakable, Carpenter said, and put a firefighter ahead of the bulldozer to direct it.

But Carpenter said no one saw an electric box concealed by plants until the bulldozer hit it and ripped up wires that served the course's water pump system.

This was on a Friday, and Pullen said he had to get the damage repaired fast or have a hot summer weekend where the course's manicured grass would turn parched with no water. He counted himself lucky to know businesses that would work fast to bring in a generator, set up new wires and install a new pump to replace one that was damaged.

But none of that would have been needed if the bulldozer hadn't damaged the old electric system, so Pullen sent contractors' invoices to the state.

The answer: No dice.

"The manner in which the Florida Forest Service monitors a smoldering wildfire ... or fights any wildfire are planning level activities for which sovereign immunity applies and is not waived," insurance specialist Dwayne Jones told Pullen in the letter that reached him last week.

Jones pointed to a law that says firefighters aren't liable for damage caused if they dig ditches, remove fences, cut fire lines or take other routine firefighting steps to combat a woods fire.

"Based on our review," Jones wrote, "we believe that [the] Forest Service has immunity for the damages."

Pullen sent an angry email to Gov. Rick Scott's office, saying he was disappointed Tallahassee seemed uninterested in the problems that were created for his business.

"Now I know and understand that personal property is not of concern in this state," Pullen wrote, "and the small businesses trying to make it are just political fodder."

Forestry crews try to repair some effects of firefighting, like going back after a blaze to mend some fences, said Ashley Carr, a state spokeswoman. But in a case like the golf course, there may not be a simple way to go back.