Opponents “waited too long to assert a claim to set aside the sale,” the court ruled (pdf) Tuesday.

A group called SaveWCAL opposed St. Olaf College’s 2004 sale of WCAL-FM to MPR from the start. The group’s contention that the sale was void under state charitable-trust laws led to a lawsuit filed in 2008.

That was within the six-year statute of limitations. But the appeals court found that reversing the deal now would harm “innocent parties” — the kiddies at The Current’s family events included.

Such potential harm to innocents creates an exception to the statute of limitations, the court said, rendering SaveWCAL’s suit too late.

In its opinion the court didn’t rule on the merits of SaveWCAL’s claims but only on whether the suit itself was tardy.

In recounting the dispute, the court included facts that appear to support SaveWCAL’s arguments, such as that MPR and St. Olaf were “co-conspirators in the breach of a charitable trust” and that the sale broke faith with decades of donations by listener-members of WCAL. From the court decision:

MPR communicated the offer to the president of St. Olaf. The president turned the offer over to a vice president of St. Olaf and the chair of the finance committee of the board of regents of St. Olaf for evaluation. The finance committee chair was also a member of the board of trustees of MPR …

St. Olaf solicited donations based on its representation that charitable gifts would “help guarantee the future of Classical 89.3 for generations to come.”

Why didn’t SaveWCAL sue earlier? Lack of funds, the group said.

Too bad, ruled the appeals court, citing this legal precedent: “Poverty alone is not a legally cognizable excuse for failure to initiate suit.”

MPR NewsQ carried an Associated Press story about the ruling as well as a New Cut blog post, where a commenter offered this assessment: “I guess you can unpack now.”

Will the appellants take their case to the state Supreme Court?

“The SaveWCAL board will now need to determine our next steps,” the organization says at its website.

SaveWCAL asserts that St. Olaf College’s $10.5 million sale of the former WCAL-FM wasn’t legal. The argument: For more than 80 years, the station was a charitable trust, meaning the college needed approval from its listener-members and a court to close such a deal. 

Northfield’s dirty laundry got aired this way in the WSJ: 

“St. Olaf has looted the assets they were charged with protecting,” St. Olaf alumna Ruth Sylte, the president of SaveWCAL, says. “Donors everywhere should be worried.”

Steven Blodgett, a St. Olaf administrator, says opponents are “harassing the college” with their court fight. “Everybody wants to just move on,” he says.

Like Coleman, SaveWCAL filed a notice of appeal at the beginning of the week. Unlike Coleman, the group took the next step today, filing its actual appeal brief at the state Court of Appeals. St. Olaf and MPR have 30 days to file their responses.

SaveWCAL wants the court to return the money to WCAL’s charitable trust, along with the fund’s $3 million endowment and the building the trust constructed on the St. Olaf College campus in Northfield, Minn. The group also wants St. Olaf removed as trustee for liquidating the station’s charitable trust without judicial approval.

In pointing out an error in the original version of this post (see below), a Minnesota Public Radio representative wrote that MPR “is confident that there is no legal reason for a judge to void the sale of WCAL. As for St. Olaf and the sale proceeds, we are not involved in that portion of the hearing.”

CORRECTION: This article, as originally posted on Sept. 25, misattributed a quoted phrase as coming from a June 9 order by Rice County District Court Judge Gerald J. Wolf (pdf). The quoted words were not Judge Wolf’s but instead came from a June 12 letter written by SaveWCAL to the state attorney general. The Minnesota Independent regrets the error.

Further clarification after the jump.

The quoted words did not, however, originate with SaveWCAL. They originated in American Jurisprudence, a legal encyclopedia, as quoted by SaveWCAL in its letter — a letter which in other places also quotes from Judge Wolf’s order.

Here is the sentence from American Jurisprudence as quoted in SaveWCAL’s letter: “Where the trustees of a charitable trust have no power under the trust instrument or under an order of a court of equity to convey such property, a deed made of such property is void and subject to cancellation upon application of proper parties.” (The last 10 words of the sentence are those mistakenly attributed to Judge Wolf’s order regarding MPR and WCAL in the original version of this post.)

As MPR pointed out in its request for a correction to this post (see below, in comments section), Judge Wolf’s June 9 order actually states, in the first sentence of the introduction: “The Court recognizes that the sale of WCAL is neither before the Court at this time nor has it ever been before the court.”

Indeed, Judge Wolf reserved his criticism not for MPR but for St. Olaf and especially the state attorney general’s office. He concluded his order’s introduction with this:

The only watchdog looking out for the interests of the trust in this case was Respondent, the non-profit organization SaveWCAL. SaveWCAL raised the alarm when they first learned of the sale of WCAL by St. Olaf, but neither St. Olaf nor the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office paid any heed to SaveWCAL’s warning.

Now, the Court is faced with a plethora of issues to unravel in the aftermath of St. Olaf’s unapproved sale of WCAL and the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office’s breach of its duties in this case.

Here are links to MnIndy’s earlier posts related to the MPR/St. Olaf deal for WCAL/The Current, which themselves contain links to original documents as well as to news coverage elsewhere:

Donors’ group demands AG act to void deal that created MPR’s The Current (June 13, 2008)

Judge finds WCAL-FM, station now ‘The Current,’ was St. Olaf trust (June 11, 2008)

Hatch’s lack of concern for charitable trusts predated WCAL dustup (May 29, 2008)

‘Screwed’ again: Piper Jaffray fined for violating ban after improper T-Paw donations (May 16, 2008)

Kick a Man When He’s Down (For the Count) (July 6, 2007, third item)

Alternating Current? Lawsuit Aims to Void WCAL Sale (June 14, 2007)