Former Virgin Islands government employees filed a lawsuit in June 1998 claiming they’d been wrongly excluded from retroactive pay raises. On Jan. 9 — 27 and a half years later — the back pay was headed their way.
Superior Court Judge Jomo Meade awarded more than $4.65 million to 32 of the 41 retirees who sued. Nine others had been paid in an earlier ruling, receiving between $73,906 and $205,800 each, according to court records.
The suit against the government of the Virgin Islands and the retirees’ union representatives — with 517 different docket entries — isn’t alone in spanning nearly three decades.
It took 27 years for a suit against St. Croix alumina manufacturers to be resolved. In 1997, St. Croix residents started filing suits claiming huge mounds of red dust and mud — a byproduct of alumina manufacturing — were damaging their health and property.
The resulting class action suit encompassed nearly 3,000 separate suits from more than 1,500 people, and came to include thousands of depositions, according to attorney Lee Rohn in a video on the suit.
Several hundred plaintiffs died waiting for the suit’s resolution, according to court records.
On Aug. 26, 2024, as a trial date drew near, attorneys for Alcoa, St. Croix Alumina, Glencore International, Century Aluminum Company, and associated entities told Judge Andrews that they’d agreed to a deal.
The details of the settlement were not made public but Rohn and others seemed pleased in the video created by Public Justice, a nonprofit advocacy organization focused on systemic threats from “abusive corporate power and predatory practices, the assault on civil rights, and the destruction of the Earth’s sustainability.”
Other lawsuits sit idle.
Many of the people claiming they were wrongly exposed to carcinogens at a St. Croix alumina plant in an October 2007 suit have since died awaiting trial, according to documents obtained by the Source. Their cases were carried on by family members.
Grouped into six lawsuits, the court action brought more than 18 years ago eventually grew to include 138 people claiming injuries to themselves or to family members.
Attorneys for defendants Lockheed Martin Corporation, Martin Marietta Corporation, Martin Marietta Aluminum, Inc., and Martin Marietta Aluminum Properties, Inc. had long argued against a rush to trial, saying nearly two decades was not enough time to resolve legal questions about the case. In January 2024, Lockheed’s local attorney directed the Source to a 6,673-page document detailing the legacy of one claimant’s case. The tome included reams of seemingly unrelated schematics for Lockheed Martin products.
In February 2025, a Superior Court judge scheduled the trial for October of that year. It was never held.
On Jan. 9, the most recent filing in a 2017 suit alleging conspiracy and price-fixing in the Virgin Islands’ lucrative concrete market said, “the case was at a standstill.”
Two St. Croix men, Linus Gilbert and James Jn-Marie, alleged in the suit that two concrete companies, Spartan Concrete Products, LLC. and Heavy Materials, LLC., unfairly divided up the Virgin Islands, resulting in a leap in concrete prices.
After years of aggressive “price war” competition, the two companies secretly agreed to cooperate. Spartan would leave the St. Thomas market and concentrate on St. Croix, and Heavy Materials would likewise abandon St. Croix for St. Thomas, according to the lawsuit.
The sudden end of competitive pricing caused a dramatic increase in cost to consumers. Both companies were then bought by the national brand U.S. Concrete in 2015. U.S. Concrete had two independent monopolies in the Virgin Islands, the suit alleges.
The suit claims the companies violated the Virgin Islands’ antitrust and consumer protection laws.
Both sides in the more than eight-year-old suit were waiting on Superior Court Judge Alfonso G. Andrews Jr. to move the case along, according to court records.
