In re the Marriage of Gano-Ridge

155 P.3d 84, 211 Or. App. 393, 2007 Ore. App. LEXIS 393
CourtCourt of Appeals of Oregon
DecidedMarch 21, 2007
Docket150316348; A127997
StatusPublished
Cited by6 cases

This text of 155 P.3d 84 (In re the Marriage of Gano-Ridge) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals of Oregon primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
In re the Marriage of Gano-Ridge, 155 P.3d 84, 211 Or. App. 393, 2007 Ore. App. LEXIS 393 (Or. Ct. App. 2007).

Opinion

BREWER, C. J.

Wife appeals from a dissolution judgment, assigning error to the property division, to the calculation of child support, and to the trial court’s failure to award her attorney fees. On de novo review, ORS 19.415(3), we modify the property division, award wife attorney fees, order husband to share in the minor child’s counseling expenses, and otherwise affirm.

The parties were first married in October 1993 and then again in April 1995, after husband’s dissolution from a previous marriage became final.1 They separated in November 2002, and the judgment dissolving their marriage was entered in March 2005. At the time of trial, husband was 52 and wife was 47. The parties have one child, who was bom in 1994. Wife was awarded custody of the child, and husband does not contest that determination.

Wife entered the marriage with a $10,000 college debt and a one-third interest in 160 acres of land in Lake County (the Summer Lake property). In contrast, husband owned significant assets at the time of the marriage. He is the only child of his parents. His father died in 1992, before the parties were married. Husband’s mother lived with husband after his father’s death, and she continued to live with the parties after their marriage and until her death in 1996. Before the marriage, and as a part of her estate plan, husband’s mother made husband a joint owner of some of her assets, including a Paine Webber investment account. When husband’s mother died in 1996, he became the sole owner of the Paine Webber account as well as her house, which he sold for $140,000. He placed the proceeds of the house sale and a small inheritance from other relatives into the Paine Webber account.

At the time of the marriage, husband also owned interests in four Wyoming properties, the Merritt Ranch, the Hoopes Ranch, the Afton Homestead, and the Brough Ranch. For the first eight years of the marriage, the Afton [396]*396Homestead was the marital residence, from which the parties managed the contiguous Merritt, Hoopes, and Nield ranch properties. The house was dilapidated. Husband had begun an addition and remodel in 1991, and wife and husband worked together to complete it. Wife has a master’s degree in social work, but she has not worked in that field and was not employed outside the home during the marriage. At the time of their marriage, the parties contemplated that they would be partners in the ranching enterprise and would work as a “married team” to manage the properties. Wife managed the household and, at least at the beginning of the marriage, devoted considerable efforts to the decision-making, planning, and operations of the ranching enterprise. Her contributions included shared responsibility for ranch management, remodeling the family home, homemaking and, in the first three years of the marriage, caring for husband’s mother.

During the marriage, husband paid off the encumbrance on the Merritt Ranch, and he acquired the Nield property in Wyoming, the Steed property, located in both Wyoming and Idaho, the Lind and Siltcoos Lake properties in Oregon, and the Griffeth Ranch and Hot Springs properties in Idaho. In 1999, husband established the James I. Ridge Revocable Living Trust, into which he placed all of the properties held in his name, which included all of the properties except the Merritt property. Husband named wife as successor trustee, but he removed her in February 2004, after she filed for dissolution.

Because there was little income from the ranch properties, the parties lived primarily on Paine Webber funds until husband withdrew the remaining funds from that account in 1998. Wife had no independent source of income but, during the marriage, she shared in financial management responsibilities. The parties had a joint checking account, and wife signed checks for ranch and household expenses on that account and on husband’s separate accounts, including the Paine Webber account. Wife also incurred credit card debt for the parties’ living expenses, and she is listed as a co-obligor on a $400,000 loan that the parties [397]*397took out in 2001 to clear encumbrances from two ranch properties. In 1995,1996,1999, 2000, 2001, and 2002, the parties filed joint tax returns.

The parties were separated between June 1998 and February 1999 and, dining that period, wife lived in Oregon on the Siltcoos Lake and Summer Lake properties. In February 1999, the parties reconciled, and wife returned to Wyoming. From May 2001 until November 2002, the parties “roughed it” in a camper and an unimproved structure located on the Grifieth Ranch and Hot Springs properties in Idaho. They planned to develop the property as a health spa and dude ranch. In November 2002, the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare informed the parties that they needed to make certain improvements to the property to make it habitable and that, if their living conditions did not improve, they risked losing custody of the child. At that time, wife took the child to the Siltcoos Lake property in Oregon, and the parties permanently separated.

The primary issue on appeal is the division of property. The trial court awarded wife personal property valued at $38,000, her Summer Lake property, which it did not separately value as a part of the marital estate, and the two Oregon properties that husband acquired during the marriage — Siltcoos Lake and Lind — which the court estimated had a total value of $206,000, subject to encumbrances of $17,000. The court also awarded wife an equalizing judgment of $90,495. Accordingly, the trial court awarded wife property to which it assigned a value of $334,495, or $317,495, net of encumbrances. The court awarded to husband the remainder of the properties and also assigned to him almost all of the marital debt and encumbrances on the properties. On appeal, wife contends that the trial court overvalued the properties that it awarded to her, undervalued the properties awarded to husband, and awarded a disproportionately large share of the marital property to husband. For those reasons, and because, she asserts, the court failed to adequately consider her contributions to the marriage, wife argues that the court did not make a just and proper distribution of property. On de novo review, ORS 19.450, we modify the award.

[398]*398In dividing the parties’ property, we follow ORS 107.105(l)(f)2 as construed in Kunze and Kunze, 337 Or 122, 133-36, 92 P3d 100 (2004). Under that case, we undertake a series of inquiries, described by the Supreme Court as follows:

“Because ORS 107.105(l)(f) distinguishes between property brought into the marriage and marital assets, the court’s first step in applying that statute is to determine when the parties acquired the property that is at issue. If the parties acquired the property at issue before the marriage, then the court considers only what is just and proper in all the circumstances’ in distributing that property. ORS 107.105(l)(f).

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In re the Marriage of Morgan
344 P.3d 81 (Court of Appeals of Oregon, 2015)
In Re the Marriage of Wolfe
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In re the Marriage of Patterson
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Patterson and Kanaga
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In re the Marriage of Ridge
159 P.3d 1292 (Court of Appeals of Oregon, 2007)

Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
155 P.3d 84, 211 Or. App. 393, 2007 Ore. App. LEXIS 393, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/in-re-the-marriage-of-gano-ridge-orctapp-2007.