Meijer appeal rejected by Michigan Supreme Court

The Michigan Supreme Court has rejected an appeal by Meijer, Inc., in a lawsuit involving the retail giant’s illegal effort to recall officials in Acme Township, Mich. who rejected Meijer’s plan to build a new store there. The rejection of the appeal clears the way for a damages lawsuit against Meijer to proceed.

Meijer had filed an emergency appeal with the high court, asking them to grant a stay of a lower court order that had been previously upheld by the appeals court on August 27. The Supreme Court was supposed to rule on that appeal by September 16, but the ruling finally came down on Monday and it granted the request for emergency consideration but denied the request for an appeal and the request for a stay of the lower court order. You can view the order here.

As reported in an earlier story, Meijer has been locked in a battle for several years with officials in Acme Township, in Michigan’s Grand Traverse County, after the township did not approve a proposal for a new Meijer store there in 2004. Meijer then surreptitiously and illegally funded a group of local citizens to recall Acme officials who did not support the project.

A series of lawsuits went back and forth between township officials and the retail giant, but the two sides essentially reached an agreement to drop all the cases and stop suing each other. Then the Secretary of State’s office intervened, found Meijer guilty of illegal campaign finance contributions in the case and fined them $190,000, the maximum allowed by law.

That prompted another lawsuit by an Acme Township official who was a victim of the Meijer-funded recall effort, seeking damages as a result of Meijer’s illegal activity.

Meijer filed a motion to dismiss and argued that the agreement to drop the previous lawsuits between the two sides ruled out any new cases, while the Acme Township official argued that the state charges and fine were a material change in the situation that voided that agreement.

Essentially, the Acme official argued that the township should be allowed to file a new suit because now, due to the state’s investigation, they could prove that Meijer had done what they were accused of doing.

The lower-court judge in the suit agreed, prompting the emergency appeal to the appeals court, which agreed with the lower court and refused to dismiss the case. Now the state Supreme Court has done the same, allowing the lawsuit against Meijer to move forward.

In our previous article, we noted that several Meijer executives and members of the Meijer family had donated sizable sums of money to several justices on the Supreme Court, noted studies done of state supreme courts in other states that had concluded that campaign contributions have a clear impact on cases that the contributors have before the courts, and wondered aloud if it would do so here.

That question has been answered, and the answer appears to be no. All seven justices on the court were unanimous in rejecting the appeal.