Judge Ronald F. Frank, Case Number: 21STCV34889, Date: 2024-07-12 Tentative Ruling

Judge: Ronald F. Frank, Case: 21STCV34889, Date: 2024-07-12 Tentative Ruling

Case Number: 21STCV34889 Hearing Date: July 12, 2024 Dept: 8

Tentative Ruling

HEARING DATE: July 12, 2024

CASE NUMBER: 21STCV34889

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CASE NAME: Conjunction junction, LLC v. Ashley Erin Ellison, et al

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MOVING PARTY: Plaintiff, Conjunction Junction LLC and Cross-Defendant, Peppertree Estate LLC

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RESPONDING PARTY: Non-Party, The Assessor of the County of Los Angeles

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TRIAL DATE: September 16, 2024

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MOTION:¿ (1) Motion for Reconsideration of the Court’s April 22, 2024 Ruling on Petitioner’s Motion to Compel Further Answers to Deposition Questions

Tentative Rulings: (1) Motion for Reconsideration is DENIED.

I. BACKGROUND¿

A. Factual¿

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This is a nuisance and trespass action involving adjacent parcels of land in the Portuguese Bend area of Rancho Palos Verdes. The first parcel is owned by Plaintiff/Cross-Defendant Conjunction Junction LLC (“Cross-Defendant”), with no street address but designated as APN 7572-016-024 (“CJ Parcel”). The second parcel is owned by Defendant/Cross-Complainant Ashley Erin Ellison, as Trustee of The Porter Trust (“Cross-Complainant”) with a street address of 1 Pomegranate Road, Rancho Palos Verdes, California 90275 (“Porter Parcel”).

On September 22, 2021, Cross-Defendant commenced this action by filing the Complaint alleging that the house, driveway, and outlying buildings on the Porter Parcel are encroaching on CJ Parcel and Cross-Complainant has failed to remedy these conditions. The case was originally pending in downtown LA as a PI case but was transferred to the SW District Department B (Judge Tanaka) in Torrance before being reassigned to this Court in Inglewood as of October 10, 2022. While the matter was pending in Torrance, Judge Tanaka denied Conjunction Junction’s motion to appoint a receiver and denied Gretzel Hunt’s Motion for Leave to File a Complaint in Intervention. Hunt claimed to be the buyer of the Porter Parcel who opened escrow in March of 2021.

On October 27, 2022, Cross-Complainant filed a Third Amended Cross-Complaint (“3AXC”) for quiet title including: (1) Prescriptive Easement on Lot 24; (2) Adverse Possession of Lot 24; (3) Prescriptive Easement on Lot 19; (4) Adverse Possession of Lot 22; (5) Prescriptive Easement on Lot 22; (6) Adverse Possession of Lot 22; and (7) Equitable Easement.

On May 30, 2024, this Court heard Plaintiff’s Motion to Compel Further Responses to Deposition Questions and Production of Documents, Set One. This Court DENIED the motion as to document categories 1 through 5. However, this Court GRANTED the motion as to the Assessor’s failure to produce a PMK on category 6 at the .deposition

Now, Plaintiff and Cross-Defendant move for reconsideration on the Court’s order based on a statement made by the Los Angeles County Assessor, Jeffery Prang, on June 4, 2024, five (5) days after the hearing.

B. Procedural

On June 7, 2024, Plaintiff and Cross-Defendant filed a Motion for Reconsideration. On June 28, 2024, Non-Party, the Assessor of the County of Los Angeles filed an opposition. On July 5, 2024, Plaintiff and Cross-Defendant filed a reply brief.

II. ANALYSIS ¿

A. Legal Standard

When a court granted or denied a prior application for an order in whole or in part, the original party making the application may make an additional application for the same order when it based upon “new or different facts, circumstances, or law in which case it shall be shown by affidavit what application was made before, when and to what judge, what order or decisions were made, and what new or different facts, circumstances, or law are claimed to be shown.” (Code Civ. Proc. § 1008(b).) If a party fails to comply with Code of Civil Procedure § 1008(b), the court may revoke or set aside on ex parte motion any order following the application. (Id.) If a change in law warrants reconsideration of a prior order entered, the court may make a motion on its own and enter a new order. (Code Civ. Proc. § 1008(c).) An application that fails to comply with CCP § 1008 cannot be considered. (Code Civ. Proc. § 1008(e).)

Section 1008 is “the clear legislative intent to restrict motions to reconsider circumstances where a party offers the court some fact or authority that was not previously considered by it” and could not have been considered by it.¿ (Gilberd v. AC Transit (1995) 32 Cal.App.4th 1494, 1500.)¿ Section 1008 is the exclusive means for modifying, amending or revoking an order.¿ That limitation is expressly jurisdictional.”¿ (Id. at p. 1499.)¿¿¿

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“The burden under section 1008 is comparable to that of a party seeking a new trial on the ground of newly discovered evidence: the information must be such that the moving party could not, with reasonable diligence, have discovered or produced it at the trial.”¿ (New York Times Co. v. Superior Court (2005) 135 Cal.App.4th 206, 212-13.)¿ There is a strict requirement or diligence on the moving party; the moving party must present a satisfactory explanation for failing to provide the evidence or different facts earlier.¿ (Garcia v. Hejmadi (1997) 58 Cal.App.4th 674, 690.)¿ Evidence obtained after a is not ground for reconsideration where there was no showing why evidence could not have been obtained earlier.¿ (Jones v. P.S. Develop. Co., Inc. (2008) 166 Cal.App.4th 707, 725, overruled on other grounds in Reid v. Google, Inc. (2010) 50 Cal.4th 512, 530 [discussing evidence discovered after a hearing on a motion for summary judgment].)¿

B. Discussion

Here, the moving parties suggest that this Court based its opinion, in part, on the representation from the Los Angeles County Assessor’s Office that it did not have policies regarding whether property lines in the Portuguese Bend Landslide region moved with the surface improvements and that it did not have policies regarding whether the moving surface improvements triggered reassessments. The moving parties assert that on June 4, 2024, five (5) days after the Court’s ruling on the discovery motion, the Los Angeles County Assessor, Jeffery Prang, spoke at the city council meeting for the city of Rancho Palos Verdes about how the Los Angeles County Assessor’s Office is handling the landslide. The moving parties contend that at the meeting, Prang stated:

“One of the really interesting things for my office that makes it very difficult in Portuguese Bend is that when you own property in the County, your piece of property is in a fixed location. We use a number of geographic pointers that establish where your parcel is. As you know the properties in these landslides are moving. So, we actually have homes that are located on somebody else’s parcel. There is nothing in the law that guides my office on how to deal with this situation. We have houses that may be two or three parcels away from the one that they own. So, we’ve been asked how do we assess that and the truth is we pretend that they haven’t moved. So, you’re still assessed with your parcel even though your home is on somebody else’s parcel because the law doesn’t give us any guidance on how to do things differently. And I’m not the guy who’s charged with trying to figure that out. We’re just paper pushers in a lot of ways.”

Based on the above statement, moving parties argue that either the Los Angeles County Assessor’s Office adopted a policy in the five (5) days between the hearing and the Council meeting, or the Los Angeles County Assessor admitted that his office was lying to the Court. Because of this, moving parties argue that this statement is a “new fact” that occurred within ten (10) days of the initial ruling on this motion. The Court disagrees that this is a “new fact.”

As described in the Assessor of the County of Los Angeles’ opposition brief, this statement made by Prang tracks in the same or similar way as the subpoena cited in the opposition to the original motion. The subpoena provided statements such as: (1) the “Assessor is not the custodian of this information, does not maintain it and cannot modify it, except to remove it from the website altogether”; (2) the “Assessor does not have the responsibility to create or modify the Tract Maps. Assessor identifies the properties in its jurisdiction for assessment purposes by verifying the legal description in recorded transfer documents provided to [them] by the Recorder’s Office, and tract/subdivision maps provided to [them] by the local government entities or other County departments”; (3) “Assessor does not have the authority or legal means to modify legal description of the real property or to conduct independent land surveys, but merely keeps records of this information provided to him by third parties.”; (4) “Tract maps are generated by developers and approved by local government entities such as City of Rancho Palos Verdes or LA County Department of Public Works prior to being recorded. Assessor is therefore not the custodian or record and accordingly does not have the authority or means to affect modification of tract maps”; and (5) “Assessor does, however, have statutory obligations to create maps per RTC Section 327 which are also known as ‘parcel maps.’ Parcel maps only describe parcels of land, and do not describe improvements. Based on available records, LA County Assessor has not changed parcel maps in response to the landslide occurring in Portuguese Bend.”

All of these quotes above have already been analyzed by this Court prior to the original hearing on the motion at issue. What the quotes informed this Court’s decision of was that there is no policy for whether the moving surface improvements triggered reassessments. In the Court’s view, Mr. Prang’s statements do not show that the Assessor’s office was lying or that the Assessor changed or adopted policies in the intervening five days between the hearing on the motion and the City Council meeting. Instead, the Court’s interpretation is that Mr. Prang reiterated the Assessor’s previous position, which is that that there are no policies, and so they assess based on the unmodified tract maps (meaning, that the property would be assessed as if it did not move.) The Assessor’s statement about “pretend that they haven’t moves” is an indication that there is no policy to reassess when there is surface movement of a parcel. The question of whether there should be such a policy is an issue that may be resolved in this case, but from the evidence before the Court the Assessor does not treat surface movement as a triggering event for reassessment. Because this Court does not find that the Prang statement from June 4, 2024 is a “new fact” much less a new fact which would change this Court’s ruling from its May 30, 2024 ruling, this Court DENIES the motion for reconsideration.

III. CONCLUSION¿

Based on the foregoing, Plaintiff and Cross-Defendant’s Motion for Reconsideration is DENIED. The Court’s May 30, 2024 order is to stand.