EAST HAVEN — A Willington businessman will receive an $11 million settlement after suing the town for $55 million, alleging officials illegally shut down his Barberry Road quarry for corrupt political reasons.
The settlement, announced Wednesday, resolves claims filed in 2017 against the administration of retired Republican Mayor Joe Maturo Jr. It follows a federal judge’s ruling awarding quarry owner John Patton $9.47 million in damages, plus more than $1 million in prejudgment interest and attorney’s fees, according to Ed Sabatino, the city’s assistant director of administration under Democratic Mayor Joe Carfora.
“The Town’s liability would have risen to over $12 million in the coming months, and had the case not settled, post judgment interest would have continued to accrue at approximately $38,000 per month,” Sabatino said in a Wednesday statement.
Patton was unable to be reached for comment.
Carfora’s administration, which inherited the case when Carfora took office in 2019, began negotiating a settlement with Patton’s counsel in December.
Patton, the managing member of the quarry’s corporate owner, One Barberry Real Estate Holding LLC, originally filed a $30 million lawsuit against the town and a second $25 million federal complaint against Maturo, former Zoning Enforcement Officer Christopher Soto and former Assessor Michael J. Milici.
The city argued that the shutdown, which occurred in May 2017, occurred because the multimillion-dollar basalt trap rock quarry violated town zoning regulations. Patton argued that the quarry, which he rented in 2013 and purchased in 2016, was a non-conforming use that predated the town’s zoning laws by many years.
‘Conscience-shocking’ corruption
A 119-page ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Sarala V. Nagala in 2023 cleared Milici of wrongdoing, but said that Patton and One Barberry had “proven by a preponderance of the evidence that the Town, Maturo, and Soto deprived them of substantive due process protections in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
The amendment guarantees due process and equal protection under the law.
Nagala wrote that Maturo, Soto and other town officials engaged in a lengthy fight, from approximately 2008 to 2017, against quarry operations at 1 Barberry Road near the East Haven-Branford line in response to heavy residential opposition to quarry operations. They repeatedly shut down the quarry and delayed its blasting permits in attempts to harass Patton, Nagala wrote.
Maturo, mayor from 1997 to 2007 and from 2011 until his retirement in 2019, was accused of repeatedly demonstrating selfish political motivation in battling the quarry and using his influence to effectively neuter the Zoning Board of Appeals as an independent body when Patton appealed city actions.
She called the actions of Maturo and Soto “conscience-shocking.”
At one point, Maturo directed Soto to issue a cease-and-desist order against the quarry. Trial evidence revealed that he partly attributed his 2007 mayoral loss to the controversy surrounding the quarry. Over the years, he repeatedly pressured Patton to make decisions against his own interests and leveraged his connections with other town officials to turn them against Patton while bolstering his own 2017 reelection efforts, Nagala wrote.
“Maturo acted in selfish pursuit of his own political interests,” Nagala wrote.
Nagala wrote that Soto ignored the law in deciding on one occasion to shut down Patton’s operation on false claims of an alleged lack of safety in quarry operations. Nagala cited how Soto’s testimony at trial contradicted his actions with the Zoning Board of Appeals.
Soto testified to the board in support of a cease-and-desist order shutting down the quarry “that he observed numerous rocks and boulders rolling down the hill on the property, which he believed to pose a risk of danger. But he did not show the Court the photos or video that he showed the ZBA evincing that multiple rocks and boulders were indeed rolling down the hill on the property,” Nagala wrote.
Soto told the ZBA that the zoning office’s phone log contained 35 phone messages demonstrating many complaints about the quarry, but “relatively few of those messages were complaints about the quarry,” Nagala wrote.
“A zoning enforcement officer cannot simply choose which of his predecessors’ binding decisions he likes and does not like, and ignore those with which he does not agree, to the detriment of an individual’s property interest; such conduct is, by its very nature, arbitrary,” Nagala wrote in her decision.
Insurance coverage
The town and Patton reached a tentative agreement to settle the lawsuit about two weeks ago. The final settlement terms were recently completed, and the necessary documents have been submitted to the court.
Dismissal documents will soon be filed with the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, Sabatino said.
Town officials, expecting a settlement of some sort since August, deposited $13.5 million into a restricted interest-bearing account to secure the judgment rather than purchasing an appeal bond and incurring its associated costs.
The account has accrued over $220,000 in interest. The settlement payment was made from this account, and the remaining balance of approximately $2.7 million was returned to the town, Sabatino said.
The town, meanwhile, is pursuing a claim against its two insurance carriers, arguing that the carriers should have indemnified the town against the lawsuit from the beginning, he said.