Can't Hide Forever . . .

Creed-21 v. City of Wildmar, No. E066367 (D5 Dec. 19, 2017) 

This is a CEQA administrative mandamus case challenging the development of a Walmart in Riverside County. Please don’t just stop reading. This isn’t about CEQA. It is about discovery sanctions.

Walmart suspected that Plaintiff—which passes itself off as an advocacy organization—is really just a dummy for the Plaintiff’s lawyer. Its headquarters address was the same as the lawyer and prior settlements had been paid directly to him. 

So Walmart noticed Plaintiff’s PMQ and demanded documents about the Plaintiff’s organization. Plaintiff objected that the depo location was more than 75 miles from the PMQ’s address. But it wouldn’t say who the PMQ was or where that person lived. Very sketchy. When Plaintiff wasn’t forthcoming after more meet and confers, Walmart moved to compel and asked for sanctions, which the court granted. The court ordered the depo and the document production within ten days and issued $3,000 in sanctions.

Plaintiff then engaged in a serious of machinations to make sure the depo never occurred. It the course of that, it ignored another court ruling ordering that the depo occur. It managed to drag out the depo to the point that briefing on mandamus petition was complete and the depo had not been taken. So defendants moved for issue sanctions on Plaintiff’s standing. Which the trial court—after making a series of findings about Plaintiffs obstructionism—granted. And since a lack of standing was fatal to the petition, that ended the case.

The Court of Appeal affirms. 

Plaintiff had failed to abide by a court order to produce a PMQ witness and documents, which included a monetary sanction. It then failed to abide by a second order to schedule the deposition. Since these orders were insufficient to convince Plaintiff to participate in the deposition, it was well within the trial court’s authority to enter an issue sanction at that point. In coming to its result the court notes that a sanction that has the effect of terminating a case does not necessarily require proof of bad faith.

Affirmed.