DISMISSED: November 8, 2007
CBCA 865
UTICA MUTUAL INSURANCE COMPANY,
Appellant,
v.
DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE,
Respondent.
Bruce W. Hoover of Goldberg Segalla LLP, Buffalo, NY, counsel for Appellant.
The case caption as the decision prints it. Every word is kept; the rule the Board draws around it is not text, so it is not repeated here.
Ronald Mulach, Office of the General Counsel, Department of Agriculture, Milwaukee, WI, counsel for Respondent.
GILMORE, Board Judge.
Order
In this matter, appellant, Utica Mutual Insurance Company (Utica) seeks to clarify its rights and obligations under the payment bond it furnished in connection with a timber sale contract between the Department of Agriculture, Forest Service (DAFS) and Payne Enterprises (Payne). After Payne defaulted under the contract, Utica paid $757,334.64 to DAFS under the payment bond. The parties are in dispute as to what other financial obligations appellant has to DAFS under the payment bond, and whether appellant is entitled to an assignment of DAFS’s rights against Payne.
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2 CBCA 865
On October 12, 2007, respondent filed a motion to dismiss the appeal under the Contract Disputes Act of 1978, 41 U.S.C.A. §§ 601-613 (2006) (CDA), on the grounds that: (1) there is no contract between appellant and respondent; (2) there is no claim by a contractor against the Government relating to a contract; and (3) there is no final decision by the contracting officer. Appellant did not file a response to the motion. Instead, appellant and respondent filed a joint stipulation, agreeing and stipulating that the Board does not have subject matter jurisdiction under the CDA and that the appeal should be dismissed with prejudice. While the parties have no authority to independently determine whether the Board has jurisdiction, it is clear that the parties believe that this matter is not properly before the Board, and that they do not want the Board to proceed with the appeal.
Accordingly, this appeal is DISMISSED.
BERYL S. GILMORE
Board Judge
This is a verbatim capture of the text layer of the Board's own document in Utica Mutual Insurance Company, CBCA 865. Nothing is summarized or reworded, and the sections run in the order the Board wrote them. What the page shows and the text does not repeat is the pagination furniture: the page numbers and the rules the Board draws around its caption and under its signatures. The signatures are set back into the columns the Board prints them in, each judge under the name he or she signed, and the typed copy of that name the page carries beneath each signature is not repeated.