July 28, 2014 – DENVER, CO. An Arkansas family, the forebearers of which settled in the Ozark Mountains in 1808, today filed a nearly five million dollar tort lawsuit against the United States in Arkansas federal district court. Matthew McIlroy and his father William L. McIlroy, who own a farm near Van Buren, filed the lawsuit pursuant to the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA); the FTCA allows lawsuits against federal agencies for the tortious actions of their employees. The McIlroy farm, which is comprised of three parcels in Franklin County in Arkansas northeast of Fort Smith, is abutted by the Ozark National Forest, which was proclaimed in 1908. The McIlroys claim that, for several years, U.S. Forest Service employees knowingly and unlawfully trespassed upon and negligently damaged, and created a nuisance upon their property. In August 2013, the McIlroys filed their administrative claim as required by the FTCA; that claim went unanswered by federal officials.

“Federal employees, including supervisors, knowingly and willfully engaged in tortious conduct as to the McIlroy farm; the government could not have been a worse neighbor,” said William Perry Pendley of Mountain States Legal Foundation (MSLF), which represents the family. “The agency admits its wrongful acts, but refuses to end its conduct or to make amends.”

In the late 1960s, the family complained that Job Corps students were trespassing on and littering its property, damaging its fences, and destroying its hay. In 1971, the family discovered the Forest Service had drilled a well on its property. Forest Service officials claimed that the well, used as a water source for Job Corps facilities, was on federal land. For years, a series of top officials repeated that statement, despite the family’s protestations.

In 1973, the Job Corps tore down a 100-year old levee built upstream of the farm at the confluence of Mulberry River and Fane’s Creek to protect the farm and the site of the Job Corps facility, which caused flooding and erosion downstream, alteration of the river bed due to silting and deposits of eroded rock, and destruction of 10 acres of the farm. Further illegal actions worsened the problem by widening a water channel across the farm.

In 1998, the family discovered part of its fence had been flattened, a sewage effluent line installed over the fence and across 50-60 yards of the farm, and Job Corps sewage effluent discharged from the line into Mulberry River. Then the Forest Service installed a “temporary” water line across the McIlroys’ property and blocked entry to the farm, used heavy equipment to blade dirt and drag drainage ditches, built a service road across the farm, poured concrete on the road, caused serious erosion, destroyed fences, and loosed family livestock.


Diane L. Patrick
Assistant to the President
MOUNTAIN STATES LEGAL FOUNDATION
2596 S. Lewis Way
Lakewood, CO 80227
303/292-2021, Ext. 27
mountainstateslegal.org

Mountain States Legal Foundation, founded in 1977, is a nonprofit, public-interest legal foundation dedicated to individual liberty, the right to own and use property, limited and ethical government, and the free enterprise system. Its offices are in suburban Denver, Colorado.