Mason v. Ashbritt, Inc.

Background

This order addressed defendants’ motions to strike class allegations in two related proposed class actions: Mason v. Ashbritt, Inc. and Horne v. Tetra Tech, Inc. The cases arose from cleanup and debris-removal work after Northern California wildfires in October 2017. The plaintiffs alleged that contractors and subcontractors removed excessive amounts of soil and sometimes failed to test for contamination, damaging private property. They asserted state-law claims including trespass, conversion, trespass to chattels, and violations of California’s unfair competition law.

The proposed Mason class included owners of real property in Sonoma, Lake, Mendocino, and Napa Counties where defendants performed wildfire-related cleanup work from October 2017 to the present. The Horne class was defined similarly. Defendants argued that the class definitions included people who were not injured or lacked standing, and that commonality, typicality, predominance, and superiority were absent.

Standing

Article III standing requires a plaintiff to allege a concrete and particularized injury that is actual or imminent, fairly traceable to the defendant’s conduct, and likely to be redressed by a favorable decision. The court held that only the named plaintiffs—not every unnamed class member—needed to satisfy Article III standing at this stage. Whether unnamed class members were injured was instead a question for the later class-certification process under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23.

The court nevertheless found that the named plaintiffs had not adequately alleged their own standing. Their complaints stated generally that defendants removed excessive amounts of soil, structures, vegetation, or other material, causing property damage, personal-property loss, annoyance, and discomfort. The court found these descriptions too vague and disjunctive to identify what harm each named plaintiff actually suffered. The plaintiffs also alleged that defendants failed to test contaminated soil but did not say that this conduct personally injured any named plaintiff.

Class Allegations

The court declined to strike the class allegations based on defendants’ arguments about class treatment. It found that the allegations of excessive excavation and failure to remove contaminated soil were not necessarily inconsistent: defendants could have removed too much uncontaminated soil while leaving contaminated soil behind. The court also declined to decide from the pleadings whether property contamination and trespass claims were inherently unsuitable for class treatment, reasoning that discovery and the class-certification process were generally the appropriate settings for that analysis.

The court emphasized that motions to strike class allegations at the pleading stage are rarely appropriate and generally should be granted only when the class definition has an obvious defect or the claims could not succeed under any circumstances. It concluded that defendants had not shown that standard was met here.

Disposition

The court granted defendants’ motions in part because the named plaintiffs had not sufficiently alleged individual standing. It granted the plaintiffs leave to amend on that issue and required amended complaints in both cases by March 4, 2020. The court denied the motions in part insofar as defendants challenged the sufficiency of the class allegations at the pleading stage. The order also set a further case-management conference for April 15, 2020.