A rural landowner who contends he was injured and his property damaged by the Heart Mountain Irrigation District’s former manager has received a $30,000 settlement from the district.

Tom Hamann sued the district over a 2018 altercation with former district manager Randy Watts. Amid a long-running dispute over the district’s access to Hamann’s Heart Mountain area property, Hamann alleged that Watts damaged his fencing and a decorative archway and hit him in the shoulder with a mini-excavator.

Watts and the Heart Mountain Irrigation District denied Hamann’s claims and Park County District Court Judge Bill Simpson initially threw out the Cody area landowner’s lawsuit; Simpson found last year that Watts and the district were legally immune from the claims filed in the suit.

However, the Wyoming Supreme Court disagreed with a portion of that decision. In July, the high court reversed Simpson and ruled that Hamann could continue to pursue his claims related to the damaged property.

The parties announced a settlement in a court filing last week. The district reportedly agreed to pay $30,000 to Hamann and a smaller sum to his appellate attorneys.

Austin Waisanen, a Cody-based attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation, called the resolution a victory that shows “the government cannot avoid its constitutional obligations because of bureaucratic technicalities.”

“Government agencies must pay just compensation when their employees take or damage property, not refuse accountability,” Waisanen said in a statement from the firm, which fights “government overreach.”

Representatives for the Heart Mountain Irrigation District, which was represented by the Wyoming Local Government Liability Pool, generally declined to comment on the litigation.

“It’s resolved and we’re happy to move forward,” the district’s current manager, Tyler Weckler, said Tuesday.

A heated altercation

Hamann owns about 100 acres of land off of Lane 17, roughly 6 miles northeast of Cody as the crow flies. A district canal, Lateral 79, runs across the northern boundary of his property, about a football field away from his home.

Going at least as far back as 2016, the district sought to build an access road on the southern side of the canal.

The district contended that it had a valid easement allowing it to construct the road on Hamann’s property — and Watts believed the landowner’s fences were in the way. Hamann disagreed.

The parties and their attorneys were still negotiating in 2018. That spring, Hamann did agree to let the district move a concrete bowl off the northeast corner of his property.

However, when Watts and another district employee arrived that day, he and Hamann got into an argument over how much work the district would be doing. Accounts of the dispute differ, but as one court filing put it, the conversation “deteriorated very quickly.”

Hamann walked away to call the Park County Sheriff’s Office while Watts reportedly told his employee to drive a mini-excavator onto Hamann’s property and start removing a fence and a wooden arch spanning the driveway. The employee recalled Watts saying that, “We’ve got 15 minutes before the deputies get here.”

Hamann saw what the workers were doing and got on the fence in an effort to stop them. That was followed by a shoving match with Watts, according to summaries contained in court documents.

Watts then reportedly drove the machine near the northwestern corner of the property and began removing parts of the fence there.

Hamann again attempted to stop Watts, and by his account, he was hit in the shoulder with the mini-excavator’s bucket. Hamann said he received serious injuries, including a fractured vertebrae, a torn tendon and labrum and herniated cervical discs. The Pacific Legal Foundation has called the incident “a government rampage.”

For his part, Watts testified that Hamann was never hit with the bucket.

Filing suit

Court records say Watts was sent home from work the day after the June 28, 2018, altercation and then fired by the board.

Hamann filed a formal governmental claim against the district in 2020 and followed up with a lawsuit in Park County District Court in June 2021. He asserted that the damage to his fence and archway amounted to inverse condemnation and that the damage and blow from the bucket violated his civil rights. In a 2022 filing, Hamann indicated that he was seeking upwards of $1.19 million.

That included about $7,500 for alleged damage to his archway, with much larger sums sought for the alleged blow from the excavator: $800,000 for pain and suffering, $12,000 in past medical medical expenses, $250,000 in future medical expenses and $100,000 for economic losses — asserting his injuries forced him to sell his cows and left him unable to harvest hay. At that relatively early stage in the proceedings, Hamann also indicated that he’d already incurred $20,000 in attorneys fees.

Both the district and Watts were named as defendants in the suit, which was initially filed by Powell attorney Joey Darrah. When Darrah became a circuit court judge in late 2021, Seth Shumaker of Sheridan took over.

The proceedings then came to a head in May 2024, when Judge Simpson ruled in favor of Watts and the irrigation district, dismissing Hamann’s suit.

Governmental immunity

While saying it seemed like “a close case,” the alleged blow from the mini-excavator didn’t rise to the level of a constitutional violation, Simpson wrote.

Within his analysis, Simpson referenced a similar suit that was brought against the Heart Mountain Irrigation District roughly two decades ago. 

The litigation stemmed from a 2004 altercation in which the district’s then-manager, Jim Flowers, hit landowner Steve Krenning with a shovel, breaking his arm and injuring his head. 

Flowers said it was a case of self-defense and a jury acquitted him of a felony charge of assault with a deadly weapon. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court held in 2009 that Flowers and the district were immune from the claims in Krenning’s civil suit; Simpson was one of the attorneys who represented Krenning.

As for Hamann’s inverse condemnation claim, relating to the alleged damage to his fence and archway, Simpson found that the irrigation district was immune from that claim as well.

Court records quote Watts as saying that the district’s attorney, the board’s president and, in a closed-door meeting, the board itself, had given him the authority to go onto Hamann’s property. However, one board member, Pat Nelson, testified that Watts did not have the board’s permission to go on the property and another, Scott Hecht, said the manager had been told to work with the board’s attorney.

“When we investigated, it appeared he [Watts] had not done that,” Hecht said at a deposition. “That is why he was terminated.”

Simpson ruled that, even if things played out the way Watts said, the board never took an official action, because any authorization would have been given outside of a public meeting. Therefore, he said, the district couldn’t be sued for inverse condemnation.

At the high court

Hamann did not appeal the dismissal of his civil rights claims, but, with the help of the Pacific Legal Foundation, he challenged the dismissal of the inverse condemnation claim. The Wyoming Supreme Court unanimously sided with Hamann and reinstated the suit over the summer.

The court held that the district’s “narrow stance” on its liability was inconsistent with the purpose of the state’s inverse condemnation statute, which is intended “to provide a means for landowners to seek compensation when the government forgoes formal action.”

“If agencies were permitted to escape inverse condemnation liability based on their failure to formally order the taking or damaging of property, they would be incentivized to take fewer actions at public meetings,” the court wrote in a footnote, “which is directly contrary to the legislative purpose of requiring public meetings.”

In an interview, Waisanen said the court’s ruling showed that “a lack of express authority is not a defense to the liability created under the Wyoming Constitution.”

“We just think it was kind of an artful and unmerited defense, but it’s one that the government gets away with frequently,” he said, contrasting it with the broader liability faced by private employers.

When the Supreme Court sent the case back to Simpson, it indicated he would need to sort out whether Watts’ actions were authorized by the district and the extent of the alleged damages.

Waisanen said the attorneys for Hamann and the district started discussing a potential settlement soon after the Supreme Court’s decision.

“We’re happy to settle the case for Mr. Hamann,” Waisanen said.