## Facts

- Cheryl Wrenn and David Lewis divorced in April 1998. The divorce judgment required Lewis to pay child support, provide health insurance for the children, pay 90% of uninsured medical expenses, pay spousal support for five years at specified annual amounts, and maintain life insurance securing his support obligations.
- At the time of divorce, Lewis had worked for Carleton Woolen Mills for about 23 years and earned roughly $63,000 per year as an assistant plant manager. Wrenn earned about $4,800 per year from part-time housecleaning.
- In late January 2000, anticipating that his employer would close and he would lose his job, Lewis moved to modify the divorce judgment. He sought to reduce child support and to eliminate spousal support and the life- and medical-insurance obligations.
- In February 2000, Wrenn moved for contempt, alleging Lewis was paying only part of the child support and none of the spousal support.
- After the mill closed, Lewis received unemployment benefits totaling about $14,300 per year as a displaced textile worker.
- Rather than seek management work in other manufacturing sectors, Lewis chose to pursue airline pilot training. The training program required about nine hours per week.
- The trial court found Lewis failed to conduct a meaningful job search, even though management positions existed with starting salaries of about $40,000 to $50,000 per year, including positions outside Maine.
- The trial court concluded Lewis had voluntarily chosen to remain unemployed for an extended period without adequate regard for his child and spousal support duties. It found him in contempt for failing to pay spousal support.
- When modifying child support, the trial court did not base income on Lewis’s unemployment benefits. Instead, it imputed $50,000 per year in income to Lewis based on his ability to obtain one of the identified job opportunities located in other regions of the country (and one in Mexico).
- The trial court denied Lewis’s request to eliminate spousal support and to end the insurance-related obligations. Lewis appealed, challenging both the voluntary-unemployment finding and the imputation of income based on distant employment opportunities.

## Issues

1. Did the trial court err in finding that Lewis was voluntarily unemployed after losing his job, supporting the contempt finding and the denial of his request to eliminate spousal support and related obligations?
2. Did the trial court err by imputing $50,000 in annual income based on employment opportunities that would have required Lewis to relocate far from Maine, and by using that imputed income to set modified child support?

## Decision

- The Maine Supreme Judicial Court (Law Court) affirmed the trial court’s finding that Lewis was voluntarily unemployed following the loss of his job.
- The Law Court affirmed the contempt finding based on Lewis’s failure to pay spousal support.
- The Law Court vacated the trial court’s earning-capacity determination to the extent it imputed $50,000 per year based on distant job opportunities, and vacated the resulting support calculation.
- The case was remanded for further proceedings to determine Lewis’s earning capacity on an appropriate basis and to recalculate support accordingly.

## Legal Principles

- A support obligor who loses employment may be treated as voluntarily unemployed when the obligor does not make reasonable efforts to obtain suitable work and instead chooses an extended period of unemployment that conflicts with support duties.
- Courts may impute income when a party is voluntarily unemployed or underemployed, but the imputed amount must rest on realistic employment opportunities and a sound earning-capacity determination.
- Earning-capacity findings cannot be based solely on the availability of jobs that would require major relocation without an adequate basis for treating such relocation as reasonable under the circumstances; the analysis must reflect practical access to employment while accounting for support responsibilities.

## Conclusion

The Law Court agreed that Lewis’s limited job-search efforts and choice to pursue pilot training supported the trial court’s finding of voluntary unemployment and the contempt adjudication for unpaid spousal support, but it required a new earning-capacity and support analysis because imputing $50,000 based on distant job prospects improperly relied on employment options that would have required substantial relocation.


Wrenn v. Lewis, 818 A.2d 1005 (2003)