25 Grant Street, LLC v. Bridgeport

Citations

• 199 Conn. App. 600

Syllabus

The plaintiff sought to recover damages from the defendant city of Bridge- port, for, inter alia, negligence, in connection with a fire that destroyed its warehouse and caused substantial environmental damage to the surrounding area. The plaintiff alleged that the defendant was negligent in failing to inspect the warehouse as required by statute (§ 29-305) and that, as a result, its fire department used water rather than foam to extinguish the fire, which caused the fire to spread, when an inspection would have revealed the presence of chemicals. After a series of amended and revised complaints, the plaintiff filed a proposed complaint in June, 2018, on the same day the defendant's motion for summary judgment was scheduled to be argued. In its proposed complaint, the plaintiff newly alleged that the defendant's failure to inspect resulted in undiscovered code violations, and that these code violations were the cause of the damages. The defendant argued that the court should not consider the proposed complaint when deciding its motion for summary judgment because it was untimely and the new theory of liability was outside the statute of limitations and did not relate back to the previous complaints. The court did not decide these issues but, instead, addressed the merits of the defendant's motion and granted the defendant's motion for summary judgment on the ground that it was entitled to statutory (§ 52-557n) governmental immunity and rendered judgment thereon, from which the plaintiff appealed to this court. Held: 1. This court affirmed the judgment of the trial court on the alternative ground that the plaintiff's proposed June, 2018 complaint was not prop- erly before the trial court; the June, 2018 complaint was not the operative complaint for purposes of the defendant's motion for summary judgment because the complaint was to be in response to a request to revise but, instead, the plaintiff made substantive changes that set forth a new theory of liability and we