Opinion ID: 799464
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: The Separate Cause of Action Argument

Text: Before we go any further, we wish to dispose of an argument of Randall's. It is a meritless argument that unfortunately for Randall permeates his entire position on appeal. In a nutshell Randall characterizes the City's failure to turn over the Alpha report as a separate and distinct violation from the City's other alleged violations of the Act (e.g., not completing the disclosure form, not providing a lead information pamphlet, not including a lead warning statement in the sales contract). And, in Randall's mind, each such violation is its own cause of action complete with its own statute of limitations. So, while he now concedes that all of the City's other violations are barred by the statute of limitations, Randall argues that his cause of action for the City's failure to turn over the Alpha report survives. Relying on the discovery rule, Randall's stance is that accrual did not occur until May 2010 when he learned that the Alpha report existed after the City turned it over in discovery. Randall claims he could not have discovered the factual basis for his claim until this time. As we said though, this argument is founded on a faulty thesis, namely that the City's failure to turn over the Alpha report is a stand-alone violation of the Act with its own limitations period. We have found no support for this position, nor does Randall point us to any. Perhaps the closest he comes is to reference Smith v. Coldwell Banker Real Estate Services, Inc., a district court case out of Connecticut, which Randall claims stands for the proposition that violations of the Act are cumulative and each requirement of the Act is separate and distinct. See 122 F.Supp.2d 267 (D.Conn. 2000). However, we do not see any such language in Smith. The only arguably comparable point in that case is when the court expressed an unwillingness to accept the home seller's argument that it had a substantial compliance defense because it met some, though not all, of the Act's requirements. See id. at 272-73. But we decline to speculate as to whether this point is what Randall is attempting to rely on. Moreover, we do not disagree that the Act places multiple requirements on a seller as far as what actions must be taken (e.g., provide a lead hazard information pamphlet and permit a ten-day inspection period) and what disclosures must be made (e.g., disclose the presence of lead-based paint hazards and hand over any evaluation reports). See 42 U.S.C. § 4852d(a)(1)(A)-(C). That being said, Randall has not made a strong case for treating a seller's non-conformance with each of the Act's requirements as separate causes of action. He has not offered up any supporting case law, endeavored to conduct any statutory construction analysis, or provided any analogous examples of courts parsing out the requirements of other statutes in such a manner. As a result, we decline Randall's invitation to consider the City's failure to comply with the Act's various requirements as giving rise to multiple causes of action. We must now determine when Randall's cause of action (his single cause of action) accrued.