In mid-2012, defendants BP Exploration & Production Inc., BP America Production Co., and BP, P.L.C. (collectively, “BP”) entered into a court-supervised settlement agreement with a class of parties harmed by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The settlement agreement is described at greater length in our previous decision in In re Deepwater Horizon,
A class member seeking compensation under the agreement must submit a claim form specific to the Claim Zone that requires documentation including a tax assessment and a copy of the deed for the land parcel in the Claim Zone. This form can be submitted through an on-line portal. To screen claims, the on-line portal uses a parcel database that purports to contain “the best available parcel boundary data for real property in the” Claim Zone and data regarding which parcels are oiled. The settlement agreement acknowledges that “[i]n some instances,” the parcel boundary data in the database “may be incomplete or out of date.” Accordingly, even if the database does not recognize a parcel as being within the Claim Zone, the Claims Administrator must deem a parcel eligible for compensation “provided the claimant documents the ... [a]ctual presence of the parcel in the [Claim Zone].” All parcels within the Claim Zone are eligible for compensation; whether a parcel is oiled impacts the compensation amount. A parcel outside the Claim Zone may be added to the Claim Zone, rendering it eligible for compensation, but “only if the parcel is documented as containing the presence of oil.”
Once a class member is compensated on any claim, a six-month limitations period begins running within which the class member must submit all additional claims. The administrator of the settlement program has implemented a policy — “Policy 251” — by which the administrator may grant relief from deadlines in the settlement agreement.
The Claims Administrator shall have the discretion to consider and grant or deny Deadline Relief Requests relating to any deadline prescribed by a provision in the Settlement Agreement on the following terms: ... The claimant shall present the Deadline Relief Request to the Claims Administrator no later than 60 days after the expiration of the deadline concerned. The Claims Administrator shall reject any Request for Relief made after such time expires.
Policy 251 also provides that the party requesting relief from a deadline must show “circumstances that constitute excusable neglect under Fed.R.Civ.P. 60(b)” and enumerates other factors the Claims Administrator may consider. A claimant may appeal the “final determination of a claim” to a panel created by the settlement agreement within thirty days of receiving written notice of the final determination.
Claimants Mary Willkomm, Martin Schoenberger, Clifford Phillip Bein, and
In June 2014, Schoenberger learned that other (nonparty) co-owners of two of the five parcels that the portal indicated were ineligible had been compensated for claims on those parcels. Schoenberger attempted to submit on-line claims for those two parcels, but the portal would not allow the claims to be submitted because the six-month deadline had passed. On June 25, 2014, Schoenberger wrote to the Claims Administrator recounting his initial attempt to submit claims on the parcels that were deemed ineligible, reporting his subsequent discovery that the parcels were eligible, and attaching tax bills for the two parcels in question. Schoenberger also uploaded paper claim forms onto the online portal in October 2014, but they were not deemed “submitted” and have no claim number. Because the claims could not be submitted and thus have not been formally denied, there is no “final determination” for Claimants to appeal under the settlement agreement’s appeal procedure.
Claimants filed a “Motion for Authority to File Wetlands Claims” with the district court, invoking the court’s supervisory authority over the interpretation and implementation of the settlement agreement. Claimants asked the court to either determine that all seven of their claims were formally submitted in July 2012 before the six-month deadline had passed or excuse the missed six-month deadline and allow them to file claims anew. The district court denied the motion in a summary order, and Claimants appealed.
We decline to deem Claimants to have submitted claims on the parcels at issue in July 2012. The settlement agreement clearly designates the claim form as the manner in which claims should be submitted, and no claim forms were submitted for the two parcels at issue in July 2012, or at any time before the six-month window had closed. We are not persuaded by Claimants’ argument that “[t]here is no point in submitting the claim form” once the on-line portal indicates that a parcel is not in the Claim Zone and is thus ineligible for compensation. The settlement agreement clearly provides that “[i]n some instances,” the parcel boundary data in the database “may be incomplete or out of date.” Claimants were thus on notice that the on-line portal was not a perfect indicator of eligibility, and if they disagreed with its determination, the settlement agreement left it to them to “documentf] the ... [a]ctual presence of the parcel[s] in the [Claim Zone]” by submitting a parcel eligibility request form. Claimants did not do so, and we decline to nullify their failure to exhaust the procedures provided by the settlement agreement.
We also will not exercise any discretion we may have to excuse Claimants’
Claimants’ final argument is that the on-line portal for claim submissions denied them due process by preventing them from obtaining a final determination of their claims and thus barring them from the appeal process under the settlement agreement. Claimants did not make this argument in their memorandum in support of their motion before the district court, and it is accordingly forfeited. See Cent. Sw. Tex. Dev., L.L.C. v. JPMorgan Chase Bank, Nat’l Ass’n,
For the foregoing reasons, the district court’s order denying Claimants’ Motion for Authority to File Wetlands Claims is AFFIRMED.
Notes
. BP contests that Policy 251 is a valid exercise of the Claims Administrator’s authority, but expressly waives that issue for the purposes of this appeal.