State Supreme Court hits New Year with full docket

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Is a private bid price for a project considered a trade secret under state law? When does the clock start running for a resident to challenge changes towns make to their highways? And was a Waukesha County man’s involuntary commitment properly extended?

These are the questions coming before the Wisconsin Supreme Court in three cases scheduled for oral arguments on Jan. 17.

Up first, at 9:45 a.m., is the case of Waukesha County v. J.W.J., which involves an appeal of an appellate court decision affirming an order by Judge William Domina to extend the involuntary commitment and medical treatment of a Waukesha County man who has suffered from paranoid schizophrenia since around 1990.

The man, referred to in court records simply as J.W.J., has been involuntarily committed and treated more than once over the years. The latest instance came in 2009.

County health officials subsequently tried to have that commitment extended after finding insufficient improvement in J.W.J.’s mental state. J.W.J. responded with a court challenge.

The Court of Appeals later found that the evidence the county had presented at J.W.J.’s commitment hearing had satisfied the state’s statutory standards for involuntary treatment and commitment. J.W.J petitioned the Supreme Court in June to take up his cases, and the justices agreed in September.

Separately on Jan. 17, starting at 10:45 a.m., Supreme Court justices are scheduled to hear from attorneys in North Highland Inc. v. Jefferson Machine & Tool Inc. This case stems from a dispute between two manufacturing companies that were bidding against each other in 2011 for a contract for a Tyson Foods project in the city of Jefferson.

North Highland filed a lawsuit the following year alleging that the employee charged with formulating its bid, Dwain Trewyn, had started Jefferson Machine & Tool while he was still working for North Highland. Jefferson Machine eventually also submitted a bid for the Tyson project and ultimately won the contract.

Among other things, North Highland argued that its bid amount for the project should be treated as a trade secret. But Jefferson County Circuit Court Judge William Hue and the District 4 Court of Appeals disagreed.

North Highland appealed in July, and the Supreme Court justices agreed in September to take up the case. Whether the bid price was a trade secret is just one of the issues the justices are now being asked to decide.

The final case the justices will hear Jan. 17 is Margaret Pulera v. Town of Richmond, which stems from a dispute over a highway project that reconfigured an intersection at the Rock-Walworth County Line Road and Highway M, near the towns of Johnstown and Richmond.  The work initially received approval from the Rock County Board of Supervisors but not the towns.

Only after the project was completed in 2014 did the towns pass resolutions approving the work retroactively. The towns also issued issued highway orders, which are used to authorize changes to local roadways.

Questioning the delayed approvals, Margaret Pulera, a Darien resident, sought a circuit court review of the towns’ actions. She also alleged that the new intersection was unsafe.

In reviewing the cases, the justices will be asked to consider whether Pulera had filed her petition for review in a timely manner. The state law governing town highway orders, Wis. Stat. 82.15, lets a person aggrieved by a highway order or the refusal to issue one seek judicial review under separate state statutes.

Those statutes, found in Wis. Stat. 68.12, govern municipal administrative procedures. They require certiorari petitions to be filed within 30 days of the receipt of a final determination.

The trouble is that Wis. Stat. 82.12 does not define when that clock starts running.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court has noted that the two statutes, when read together, are not clear. Yet, despite that finding, it has yet to say how they ought to be reconciled.

In the Supreme Court’s decision in the case of Dawson v. Town of Jackson, Justice David Prosser, writing for the majority, noted that the statutes could be read in two possible ways. In the end, though, Prosser stopped short of providing a reconciliation after finding that the that lack of clarity did not matter in the Dawson case.

The petitioners in Dawson, he noted, had filed their petition for review 100 days after the denial of an application. Prosser concluded that, despite the apparent discrepancy in the statutes, any reasonable interpretation of the law would disqualify so late a filing.

As for Pulera’s case, the Supreme Court had originally agreed in December 2015 to take it up. But the oral arguments, which were first scheduled for October, were later delayed following Gov. Scott Walker’s appointment of Pulera’s attorney, Dan Kelly, to the high court.

Kelly had been providing Pulera with pro bono representation. Pulera has since obtained new counsel. Follow @erikastrebel