Atwell v. City of Rohnert Park, No. A151896 (D1d1 Sept. 26, 2018)
The Sierra Club sued to stop the construction of a Wal-Mart in Rohnert Park because of something CEQA and alleged violations of zoning laws. A trial court granted a writ on the CEQA issue. But the zoning claim never really got litigated.
The City re-did the EIR to comply with the writ. But at the approval hearing, some Citizens objected on the Zoning issue that the Sierra Club had raised, but not litigated, in its prior case. Citizens then sought a writ. The trial court granted the City judgment on the pleadings, finding that Citizens’ case was barred by the res judicata effect of the earlier Sierra Club case.
So there’s two issues on appeal: (1) Is the Citizens’ case the “same claim” as the Sierra Club Petition; and (2) Are the Citizens and the Sierra Club in privy, such that it’s fair to stick the Citizens with the preclusive effect of the Sierra Club’s judgment even though they weren’t parties in the first case. The Court of Appeal answers both questions in the affirmative, and thus affirms.
On the first question, the court explains that because the Zoning claim had been raised by the Sierra Club, it would count as the same claim unless facts or circumstances changed since the earlier decision. Since they hadn’t, it is, in fact the same.
On privity, the typical hallmarks aren’t really there. There’s no legal relation between the Sierra Club and the Citizens. They aren’t alter egos or successors in interest or something like that. But in bringing writ claims against the City, they each purported to act in the interests of the general public in combatting the same harms. Under the case law, that puts them in privity so long as there’s adequate representation. The point is that a government entity shouldn’t have to endlessly litigate the same public interest issues seriatim against different individual plaintiffs.
Here, although citizens claim that they are also litigating their individual interests, those interests are basically the same as the public interests that were in play in the Sierra Club case. So unless there’s some indication that the Sierra Club didn’t adequately represent the Citizens’ interests in the first case, they are privy for the purposes of res judicata.
And then, res judicata aside, the Court analyzes the merits of the zoning question and finds that Citizens would have lost anyway.
Affirmed.
This one seems a little off to me.
The Sierra Club won the first litigation, albeit on the CEQA claim alone. But it didn’t lose on the zoning claim. So one of two things happened to the zoning claim. Either the Court didn’t reach it, because granting the writ on the CEQA gave the Sierra Club all the relief it needed. Or the zoning claim offered some other relief but was just abandoned by the Sierra Club. I don’t know much about the substantive land use law here. So it’s hard to tell which occurred.
If the zoning was just an alternative theory that the court didn’t need to reach to afford complete the relief of blocking the approval for the store, it’s hard to understand why the Sierra Club’s CEQA win should be preclusive against some other privy plaintiff. The claim was an alternative theory, never litigated, and a Plaintiff who wins is in no position to force the court to also rule on the alternative theory too. So it just doesn’t make sense that a judgment that Plaintiff wins on theory 1 where theory 2 is never reached should give rise to claim preclusion that theory 2 loses.
If, on the other hand, additional relief on the zoning theory was meaningful—like rewriting the parts of the EIR addressed to the zoning—that is relief that could have been sought by the Sierra Club, so it’s fair to call that the same claim. But if that’s the case, the original public interest litigant apparently abandoned a challenge for which real relief was available. In those circumstances, it seems unfair to say that Citizens are adequately represented and therefore in privity with the Sierra Club—a party with whom they have no prior relations, and who decided to abandon the Citizens’ key claim.
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