Durham v. Laborers' Benefits St. Louis, Inc.
| Decision Date | 20 July 2020 |
| Docket Number | Case No.: 4:18CV1184 HEA |
| Parties | COLUMBUS DURHAM, Plaintiff, v. LABORERS' BENEFITS ST. LOUIS, INC., et al., Defendants. |
| Court | U.S. District Court — Eastern District of Missouri |
This matter is before the Court on Defendants' Motion for Summary Judgment, [Doc. No. 22]. Plaintiff opposes the Motion. Also pending before the Court is Plaintiff's April 27, 2020 filing requesting various actions of the Court [Doc. No. 31]. For the reasons set forth below, the Motion for Summary Judgment is granted, and Plaintiff's requests in Doc. No. 31 are denied.
Defendants have, in accordance with the Court's Local Rules, submitted a Statement of Uncontroverted Material Facts. Plaintiff has failed to respond to these facts. Local Rule 4.01(E) provides:
Plaintiff failed to follow this rule. Pro se litigants are not excused from complying with substantive and procedural law, including the Court's Local Rules. Farnsworth v. City of Kansas City, Mo., 863 F.2d 33, 34 (8th Cir. 1988); Bunch v. Univ. of Arkansas Bd. of Trustees, 863 F.3d 1062, 1067 (8th Cir. 2017). Defendants' facts are deemed admitted pursuant to Rule 56 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and Local Rule 4.01(E).
The undisputed facts are as follows:
Construction Laborers' Pension Trust of Greater St. Louis ("the Trust") is a Taft-Hartley employee benefit plan that is jointly administered by a Board of Trustees comprised of six union-appointed trustees and six employer-appointed trustees. Defendants Gary Elliott, Don Willey, David Gillick, and William L. Luth are four of the Trustees of the Trust. Jeanette Scopino ("Scopino") is the Pension Director of the Trust. The Trust is an employee benefit plan as defined in the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) of 1974, 29 U.S.C. §§ 1001 et seq., and is subject to that Act. The Trust is financed by contributions fromemployers who are signatory to collective bargaining agreements with Laborers Locals 42 and 110 and the Eastern Missouri Laborers' District Council. Signatory employers make contributions to the Trust for each hour of work performed by an employee who performs work covered by the collective bargaining agreement ("covered work"). The eligibility requirements for a benefit from the Trust are set forth in Article 3 of the Plan Document. The procedure for calculating the amount of the pension benefit for an eligible employee is also set forth in Article 3 of the Plan Document.
Plaintiff Columbus Durham ("Plaintiff") performed covered work for approximately 17 years. For that work, his employers paid contributions on his behalf to the Trust. When Plaintiff retired in 2011, he was entitled to a pension benefit from the Trust. He began receiving a monthly pension benefit from the Trust in June 2011. At retirement, Plaintiff elected the Single-Life Annuity/36-month Guarantee, Level Income Option pension, which provides a higher benefit until age 62 or 65 (the participant's choice,) at which point the benefit is reduced. At retirement, Plaintiff had two Qualified Domestic Relations Orders ("QDROs") in favor of his two ex-spouses that the Trust was required to account for in determining the amount of the Plaintiff's monthly pension benefit. On July 20, 2011, then-Pension Coordinator Alicia Schonaerts-Difani, on behalf of the Trust, informed Plaintiff that he would be receiving a monthly pension benefit of$3,432.00 per month, which would decrease to $2,608.26 per month after he reached 65 years of age.
Subsequently, Schonaerts-Difani left her job with the Trust. Sometime later, several mistakes in pension benefit calculations were brought to the attention of the Trust's Administrative Manager, Kevin Schell. Schell then instructed Scopino to review recently granted pension applications. After review, Scopino determined that the pension benefit calculations for Plaintiff and four other retirees had been incorrectly calculated by Schonaerts-Difani, who used incorrect actuarial factors and failed to apply early retirement factors. Schonaerts-Difani also did not account for Plaintiff's two QDROs when calculating Plaintiff's benefit. The Trust asked its actuaries, Segal Consulting, to recalculate the pension benefit for the five retirees with miscalculated benefits. Due to the miscalculation, between June 2011 and August 2012 Plaintiff received $6,232.50 of overpaid pension benefits to which he was not entitled. Plaintiff's revised pension benefit was $2,971 per month. The revised pension benefit included an actuarial adjustment lowering Plaintiff's payment to account for the overpayment; that is, rather than demand immediate repayment, the Trust would recoup the overpayment over Plaintiff's expected lifetime.
Schell sent Plaintiff a letter dated September 17, 2012 informing Plaintiff of the overpayment and monthly benefit reduction. Schell requested that Plaintiffmeet with the new Pension Coordinator to discuss the repayment of the $6,232.50 and the pension options available to Plaintiff, should he choose to elect a different option. In October 2012, Plaintiff met with Trust staff for this purpose. Plaintiff walked out of that meeting. He did not make a different benefit election.
On October 20, 2012, a second letter was sent to Plaintiff reminding him of his right to elect a different benefit option. On November 26, 2012, Schell sent a third letter to Plaintiff, again reminding him to make a benefit election. Again, a list of the available pension options was also included. Again, Plaintiff did not make a new benefit election. The Trust continued to pay benefits in accordance with the pension option originally elected by the Plaintiff, i.e. Single-Life Annuity/36-month Guarantee, Level Income Option. In November 2016, Plaintiff turned 65. In accordance with his pension option, Plaintiff's monthly pension benefit was reduced to $1,528 effective December 2016.
The Plan Document provides a procedure for participants to appeal benefit decisions to the Board of Trustees ("the Board"). On March 5, 2014, after a phone conversation with the Plaintiff, Scopino sent Plaintiff a letter explaining that he could appeal to the Board his claim that he was entitled to continue to receive the monthly pension benefit he had been awarded at the time of his retirement. The letter explained that the appeal had to be received within 180 days of the date of the letter.
In May 2014, an attorney representing Plaintiff, Clyde Cahill, called the Trust asking about a decision on the appeal. Schell and Scopino left Cahill a voicemail stating that the Trust had not received an appeal from Plaintiff. The Trust received a letter from Cahill dated June 2, 2014 asking for certain information. Schell responded by letter dated June 20, 2014, providing the requested information and a copy of the Trust's Summary Plan Document. No appeal was received within 180 days of the March 5th letter.
On June 4, 2015, Plaintiff's new attorney, Sandra Moore-Dyson, requested Plaintiff's "file" from the Trust. In response, Scopino emailed Moore-Dyson a copy of the "right to appeal" letter that was sent to Plaintiff in March 2014 and informed her that the Trust had not received a written appeal from Plaintiff as of June 4, 2015. Eleven months later, on May 10, 2016, Moore-Dyson sent a letter to the Trust requesting an appeal of Plaintiff's pension determination. With this letter, Moore-Dyson enclosed a letter from a different lawyer dated March 12, 2014 and an affidavit from Plaintiff dated August 7, 2014 that had purportedly been submitted in 2014 as an appeal of Plaintiff's benefit determination to the Trust in 2014. Prior to its receipt of Moore-Dyson's May 10, 2016 letter, the Trust had not received the March 2014 letter or August 2014 affidavit. Moore-Dyson stated in her letter that she had received the requested records from the Pension Trust and did not request any additional documents from the Pension Trust in this letter.
Though the appeal was untimely, the Trust agreed to process the 2016 appeal as if it was timely filed. The Board of Trustees denied the appeal. The trust sent a letter to Plaintiff's lawyer on July 22, 2016 explaining the denial. Throughout this process, the Trust received multiple requests for information and documentation from Plaintiff and his attorneys. In response to each request, the Trust promptly provided the requested information.
In her role as Pension Director, Scopino does not have or exercise any discretionary or decision-making authority over the management of the Trust; she does not have any discretionary or decision-making authority over the Pension Fund's assets; and she does not have the authority to, nor does she give, investment advice regarding the Trust's assets.
In his Complaint, Plaintiff states that he "brings this action under Section 502(a) of ERISA, 29 U.S.C. [1132]."1 Plaintiff asserts that this action is "to recover pension due" to him "pursuant to a retirement agreement entered between Defendants and Plaintiff." Plaintiff also alleges that Defendants hav...
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