10 Marietta Street, LLC v. Melnick Properties, LLC

Citations

• 216 Conn. App. 262

Syllabus

The plaintiff, T Co., sought to recover damages for, inter alia, environmental contamination to a parcel of land it owned, allegedly caused by hazard- ous materials from a drainpipe that extended onto the land from an adjacent parcel of property owned by the defendant M Co. The defen- dants filed a motion for summary judgment, claiming that T Co. could not meet its burden of production with respect to any of its causes of action and arguing that T Co.'s responses to certain discovery failed to provide them with clear and explicit details about the alleged contamina- tion of T Co.'s property. The plaintiff filed an objection to the defendants' motion for summary judgment, a supporting memorandum of law, and several exhibits, including an affidavit from a licensed environmental professional who had conducted an environmental study of T Co.'s property. At the hearing on the motion, T Co. asserted that it had presented sufficient evidence to raise a genuine issue of material fact as to whether hazardous material from M Co.'s property had contami- nated T Co.'s property. The trial court granted the motion for summary judgment, and T Co. appealed to this court. Held that the trial court improperly granted the defendants' motion for summary judgment, this court having concluded that there were genuine issues of material fact, and the trial court's conclusions to the contrary were not legally and logically correct and were not supported by the record: to avoid summary judgment, T Co. was not required to prove its causes of action to the satisfaction of the trial court, and the defendants did not attempt to delineate or explain the substantive law governing any of T Co.'s com- mon-law or statutory claims, failing to set forth how the purported deficiencies in the evidentiary record necessarily established a lack of a genuine issue of material fact with respect to any particular element of any of the causes of action alleged in T Co.'s complaint; moreover, rather than demonst