State High Court Backs Mudslide Victim

Lisa Guthrie’s attorney insists her saga has ended with the California Supreme Court’s decision this week to deny review of a lower-court ruling finding the City of Mill Valley responsible for conditions that led to the 2006 death of her husband Walter, who was killed by a mudslide behind their Bolsa Ave. home.

Guthrie, however, has heard this song before, as recently as July, when

“That I will truly believe when I see the check clear the bank,” she said.

Guthrie’s resolve has been tested as recently as July 15, when the , rejecting the city’s appeal of a Marin Superior Court ruling in April 2009 and backing the lower court’s award of $3.7 million to Guthrie.

With the state high court’s unanimous ruling this week, Guthrie’s attorney, Alan Mayer of San Rafael, said the city and its insurance provider are out of options.

“It’s now just a question of when as opposed to if,” Mayer said. “There are no other avenues for the city to pursue. The only question is how much longer the city will make Lisa Guthrie agonize over this. It’s about time that someone had some dignity.”

City Manager Jim McCann resisted the latter point.

“It’s a very unfortunate circumstance but we believe from our standpoint that our arguments were accurate - but the courts did not agree,” McCann said.

Although the City Council and city officials decided to fight the lawsuit and not settle along the way, once the trial court rendered its $3.7 judgment against the city in 2009, that decision-making was taken out of the city’s hands.

Because the judgment vastly exceeded the city’s $250,000 insurance deductible, as well as that of the Bay Cities Joint Powers Insurance Authority, attorneys for the California Affiliated Risk Management Authorities (CARMA), which handles such cases, took the reins.

“The decisions on the case once it becomes involved in the insurance pools becomes the decisions of those pools, not the city’s,” McCann said. “The city is advised of progress but they are not our decisions.”

The case has a few more steps to take, going back to the Court of Appeals, which then sends it back to Marin Superior Court to render a final judgment. Mayer said the attorney fees and interest have now pushed the judgment to approximately $4.3 million, and the court must determine where to set the final number.

Mayer recited the claim to the Marin Independent Journal by Sacramento attorney George Murphy, who represents CARMA in the case, that it could be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Mayer called the claim “inane and outrageous,” saying there was no federal argument to be made in the case.

The incident dates back to April 2006, when a seemingly relentless rainstorm battered the Bay Area. Guthrie's lawsuit alleges city officials were aware of the deteriorating conditions high above their home at 70 Bolsa Ave. in the weeks before the fatal mudslide but chose not to do anything about it.

The case centers on the conditions on Hillside Avenue, which runs parallel to Bolsa up the hillside from the Guthries' former home, which they moved into in 1970. Hillside Ave. was built before 1925 and the city widened it in 2001. By 2005, the soil below it had started to creep down the hill.

Officials from the city’s public works department were called to the area in March 2006 after reports that Hillside Ave. was cracking at the edge above the Guthrie house.

With Mill Valley being battered by a torrential downpour, Lisa Guthrie came home from a trip to Portland on April 11 to find her 74-year-old husband in the backyard trying to clear out the culvert that ran beneath the house, as rocks and debris had started slipping down the hill.

At 3 a.m., Walter Guthrie was outside again, trying to remove a large rock. Sensing danger, Lisa Guthrie called 911, and soon she heard a loud sound and turned to see a wall of mud piled up against the sliding glass door, causing the door to bulge inward. She quickly realized that her husband was buried below the mountain of mud.

Thirty-six hours passed before emergency crews were able to pull Walter Guthrie's body from the mud. The home has remained uninhabitable since the slide.

Guthrie’s case went to trial in March 2009 and a jury ruled in the plaintiff’s favor one month later. The judge awarded $3.7 million to Guthrie and her daughter Annie, as well as $315,000 to Douglas Wilson and Peri Ann Wood, whose home further up the hill was also damaged.

The appellate court ruled that “the city's design, construction, and maintenance of Hillside Avenue, acting together, proximately caused the transformation of the creeping landslide into a rapid mud flow” at the time of the incident.

Guthrie, who has been living in an apartment in Tiburon since soon after the incident, recently sold the 70 Bolsa Ave. property to green architects Liz Miranda and Tim Rempel, who are in the midst of rebuilding a home for themselves on it.