Citizens for Free Speech, LLC v. County of Alameda

Background

Citizens for Free Speech, LLC and Michael Shaw brought this lawsuit concerning several billboards on Shaw’s property. The County had determined that the billboards violated its zoning ordinance, declared them a public nuisance, and pursued their removal.

The plaintiffs’ complaint asserted eight claims. The first two were federal claims alleging violations of free-speech rights under the First Amendment and due-process rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. The remaining claims arose under state law and included requests for administrative mandamus and prohibition. The plaintiffs sought, among other relief, an injunction preventing the County from acting against the billboards and declarations that the abatement order and zoning ordinance were invalid.

In a November 6, 2019 order, the court granted the County’s motion to dismiss the federal claims and declined to exercise supplemental jurisdiction over the state-law claims, which it dismissed without prejudice to refiling in state court. The court had ruled that the free-speech claim was barred because the plaintiffs could have raised it in earlier related proceedings. Alternatively, it ruled that the free-speech claim failed on the merits. The court also found that the plaintiffs had abandoned the due-process claim by not responding to the County’s dismissal arguments and independently concluded that the County’s arguments against that claim had merit.

Attorney’s-Fee Motion

The County sought $45,393.93 under 42 U.S.C. § 1988 for defending against the federal claims and litigating the fee motion. Under that statute, a prevailing defendant in a civil-rights case may receive fees only in an exceptional case—generally, when the plaintiff’s claims were frivolous, unreasonable, or groundless.

The County argued that the plaintiffs’ federal claims were frivolous from the beginning. The plaintiffs argued that they had a good-faith basis for both claims.

Court’s Analysis

The court found that the free-speech claim was frivolous because it was barred by claim preclusion, a rule preventing a party from bringing a later lawsuit based on claims that were raised or could have been raised earlier. The court also alternatively found the claim frivolous on the merits. It had previously determined that the challenged zoning provisions were content-neutral, meaning they regulated speech without referring to its subject or message, so certain procedural protections for content-based prior restraints did not apply.

The court likewise found the due-process claim frivolous. The plaintiffs had not responded to the County’s arguments that they received the process they were owed, that additional procedures would not have changed the outcome, and that the complaint lacked facts supporting a bias claim. The court further held that the state statute cited by the plaintiffs did not create a protected property or liberty interest and that an available state-court remedy independently defeated the federal due-process claim.

Even though it found both federal claims frivolous, the court explained that the County could recover only fees attributable to those claims. The County had to show that the requested fees were exclusively connected to the frivolous federal claims and that those claims were not intertwined with the state-law claims. The court found substantial overlap, including between the federal due-process claim and the state administrative-mandamus claim, and between the federal free-speech claim and a free-speech claim under the California Constitution.

Disposition

Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong held that the County had not met its burden of separating fees for the frivolous federal claims from fees involving overlapping state-law claims. The court therefore denied the County’s Motion for Attorney’s Fees. The order did not award the County the requested $45,393.93.