Court Opinion

ID: 9547410
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 17:47:10.094632+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:17:43.750578
License: Public Domain

Andersen, J.
Facts of Case
At issue in this case is whether violations of the Residential Landlord-Tenant Act of 1973 come under the Consumer Protection Act.
This case of first impression was certified to this court by the State of Washington Court of Appeals, Division One, at the request of the Attorney General. In making such request the Attorney General's office represented that it was "important that the Attorney General establish whether Residential Landlord-Tenant Act violations indeed violate the Consumer Protection Act" and that "because of the significant impact that a ruling on any issue adverse to the state would have, it is probable that legislative changes would need to be sought."
*544The defendants in this case are Anthony Schwab and his wife. For convenience, we will refer to Mr. Schwab as though he were the sole defendant. He bought a number of submarginal Seattle residential housing units at tax and lien foreclosure sales and thereafter rented them, usually for less than $150 per month. This litigation primarily concerns four of those units.
The defendant's management philosophy, as found by the trial court, was this: "Defendant Schwab prepared rental agreements for his tenants to sign. These agreements generally provided that in exchange for low rent, the tenant was required to take the premises on an 'as is' basis and that defendant Schwab would not provide repairs or landlord services."1 The defendant's business practices were somewhat informal, at best. For example, the rental agreements were handwritten, and the tenant in one of his units here involved paid no rent at all for the 3V2 years of his tenancy prior to the trial.
Two of the tenants complained to the Consumer and Business Fair Practices Division of the State Attorney General's office. Following an investigation, that office filed a Complaint for Injunctive and Additional Relief under the Consumer Protection Act in the Superior Court of the State of Washington for King County.
Following a 4-day trial to the court, the court found as facts that the defendant had violated sections of the City of Seattle Housing Code, Seattle Municipal Code 22.200, and of the Residential Landlord-Tenant Act of 1973, RCW 59.18. At this point it should be observed parenthetically that the city housing code violations are, by reference in the landlord-tenant act, RCW 59.18.060(1), made violations of the landlord-tenant act and they are so considered herein. The trial court concluded that the defendant's acts were violations of the landlord-tenant act and of the Consumer Protection Act, RCW 19.86.020.
*545Acting pursuant to provisions of the Consumer Protection Act, the trial court awarded restitution in the sum of $125 to a tenant found to have made a security deposit that had not been returned and awarded judgment to the State against the defendant for $8,800 in civil penalties and $25,000 in attorneys' fees. Thus, the total judgment against the defendant was $33,925 plus costs. The defendant was also enjoined from further similar acts. In argument before this court the defendant states that he has since sold the houses involved.
The defendant appeals; the State cross-appeals alleging that the trial court abused its discretion in not awarding an additional $20,158.05 in attorneys' fees.
One question is dispositive of the various issues raised by the appeal and cross appeal.
Issue
Are residential tenancies subject to the provisions of the Consumer Protection Act?
Decision
Conclusion. Residential landlord-tenant problems are within the express purview of the Residential Landlord-Tenant Act of 1973, RCW 59.18, and we perceive the Legislature's intent to clearly be that violations of that act do not also constitute violations of the Consumer Protection Act, RCW 19.86. We reverse the trial court.
In the interest of readability, the citations in this opinion have been placed in the margin wherever feasible.
The Consumer Protection Act, RCW 19.86, declares unlawful "[ujnfair methods of competition and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in the conduct of any trade or commerce". RCW 19.86.020. The authority of the Attorney General to proceed under the act is found in the following section thereof:
The attorney general may bring an action in the name of the state against any person to restrain and prevent *546the doing of any act herein prohibited or declared to be unlawful; and the prevailing party may, in the discretion of the court, recover the costs of said action including a reasonable attorney's fee.
The court may make such additional orders or judgments as may be necessary to restore to any person in interest any moneys or property, real or personal, which may have been acquired by means of any act herein prohibited or declared to be unlawful.
RCW 19.86.080.
As this court held in the leading 1972 Consumer Protection Act case of State v. Reader's Digest Ass'n, 81 Wn.2d 259, 275, 501 P.2d 290 (1972), appeal dismissed, 411 U.S. 945, 36 L. Ed. 2d 406, 93 S. Ct. 1927 (1973):
In the final analysis, the interpretation of RCW 19.86.020 is left to the state courts. This enables us to arrive at the statute's meaning by the same "gradual process of judicial inclusion and exclusion" used by the federal courts. . . . But in each case the question of what constitutes an "unfair method of competition" or an "unfair or deceptive act or practice" under RCW 19.86.020 is for us, rather than the federal courts, to determine.
In the more than a decade since that decision, this court and the other courts of this state have been engaged in that "gradual process of judicial inclusion and exclusion". Since prevailing claimants in Consumer Protection Act cases are entitled to recover, in addition to actual damages, reasonable attorneys' fees and in some cases treble damages,2 there has been no dearth of litigation under the act.
The Legislature, which adopted the Consumer Protection Act in the first instance, has further facilitated this inclusion and exclusion process. It has done so by responding from time to time to problems in the marketplace by including certain designated activities within the ambit of the act. The Legislature has, for example, specifically *547placed within the scope of the Consumer Protection Act such widely diverse activities as charitable solicitations,3 chain distributor schemes,4 usurious contracts,5 camping clubs,6 unfair motor vehicle business practices,7 discriminatory practices,8 consumer leases,9 time share activities,10 land development,11 debt adjusting,12 hearing aid sales,13 embalming and funeral directing businesses14 and telephone equipment sales.15
As will be looked at shortly, the Legislature has also considered, hut rejected, the inclusion of other activities within the act.
By inclusion of the foregoing activities within the act, not only is the Attorney General's office authorized to act in such matters, as it has in this case,16 but private litigants are likewise empowered to utilize the remedies provided them by the act.17
There is a marked difference between the judicial and legislative processes of inclusion and exclusion of activities under the Consumer Protection Act. In the legislative process, the people engaged in the activity sought to be specifically included within the act have the full opportunity to be heard and to have their particular problems considered at legislative hearings. Furthermore, the merits of any such proposed inclusion are subject to debate and amendment in *548legislative committees and on the floor of the respective houses of the Legislature.
The judicial process, on the other hand, does not always provide equivalent opportunities. In the present case, for example, the State Attorney General's office represents the interests of the public (and indirectly the rights of the individual tenants),18 whereas the landlord appearing pro se represents himself in a case which potentially affects every person in the state who rents out or ever will rent out one or more dwelling units. Although the Legislature has mandated that the "act shall be liberally construed that its beneficial purposes may be served", RCW 19.86.920, that is not to say that the judiciary should not give the most careful consideration to the "process of judicial inclusion and exclusion" of activities under the act.
The Attorney General in this case, as suggested by some commentators in the past, urges this court to hold that the Consumer Protection Act, RCW 19.86, is available as a vehicle for enforcing tenants' rights as those rights are established by the Residential Landlord-Tenant Act of 1973, RCW 59.18.19 One recurring argument, as expressed in the Attorney General's brief herein, is that "violations of statutes promulgated in the public interest constitute per se violations, thus creating in the state a power of enforcement in order that the beneficial purposes of the statutes are carried out."20 Since all statutes are presumably promulgated by the Legislature in the public interest, this is tantamount to arguing that any violation of a statute is a per se violation of the public interest and that a Consumer *549Protection Act action can be brought thereon by either the Attorney General21 or a private party.22 This court rejected that precise argument in Haner v. Quincy Farm Chems., Inc., 97 Wn.2d 753, 761-63, 649 P.2d 828 (1982). As succinctly put in Sato v. Century 21 Ocean Shores Real Estate, 101 Wn.2d 599, 601, 681 P.2d 242 (1984), "not every violation of a statute results in a per se consumer protection action."
It would serve no useful purpose to recite all of the Attorney General's arguments herein other than to note that in substantial part they track the above referenced law review commentators. With due consideration to those arguments, we nevertheless perceive the following three aspects of this matter to be determinative.
First, nothing in the legislative history of the enactment of the Consumer Protection Act suggests that it was ever intended by the Legislature to be applied to the rental of residential housing. The Consumer Protection Act had as its genesis a study conducted by the Washington State Consumer Advisory Council, a 33-person committee appointed by the Governor and chaired by the State Attorney General. We have found nothing in the history of that committee's work, which was completed in I960,23 or in the 1961 legislative deliberations on the bill which became the Consumer Protection Act,24 which in any way suggests that the vast array of residential landlord-tenant problems were among the types of unfair, deceptive and fraudulent acts or practices that the Consumer Protection Act was intended *550to address.
This is not to suggest that this historical perspective is determinative of the coverage of the Consumer Protection Act in this case; it is not. The unfair practices and competition language of RCW 19.86.020 was intentionally drawn with a broad brush to cover a broad range of human inventiveness.25 The history of the act is, however, a relevant factor to be considered when confronted, as we are here, with an effort to include for the first time the residential landlord-tenant relationship within the 2V2-decade-old Consumer Protection Act aimed at abuses in "trade" and "commerce".
Second, the respective rights and duties of residential tenants and landlords are spelled out in great detail, and an array of specific remedies provided for violations thereof, in a single comprehensive enactment, the Residential Landlord-Tenant Act of 1973, RCW 59.18. Nothing in that enactment purports to give the Attorney General any enforcement authority for violations of it.
Exhaustive efforts on the part of concerned parties and legislators went into the drafting and enactment of the Residential Landlord-Tenant Act of 1973. This work included the following: unsuccessful efforts in pre-1973 legislative sessions to pass such a bill; negotiations extending over a 9-month period by an ad hoc citizens' committee under the auspices of the Joint Interim Judiciary Committee; the introduction in the 1973 legislative session of bills in both the House and the Senate; numerous committee hearings on the bills in both houses; and the fashioning of a compromise bill by a joint House-Senate committee that worked on the bills. In addition, before the bill finally passed the Legislature at the 1973 legislative session, there was considerable floor debate in both houses, including 2 full days of debate on the Senate floor. The consideration of the bill included numerous floor amendments in both *551houses, the adoption of some 22 amendments in the House and the adoption of about half of the 110 floor amendments considered by the Senate.26
The Governor thereupon exercised his item veto on the bill 14 times. In due course, this court was heard from on the bill and in Washington Ass'n of Apartment Ass'ns, Inc. v. Evans, 88 Wn.2d 563, 564 P.2d 788 (1977), the item vetoes were declared invalid. The enactment thus became settled law in the form in which it passed the Legislature.
In sum, it is hard to perceive of a more thoroughly considered piece of legislation than the Residential Landlord-Tenant Act of 1973. The history of that enactment shows the care exercised by the Legislature in writing the act and in delineating the specific rights, duties, and remedies of both landlords and tenants. For this reason, along with the other reasons stated herein, we decline to now expand the coverage of that act by interpretation so as to include a Consumer Protection Act cause of action.27
At this point it is appropriate to observe parenthetically that the tenants who were renting premises on an "as is" basis here, in violation by the landlord of the Residential Landlord-Tenant Act of 1973,28 had the right to themselves proceed directly against the landlord and recover their actual damages as well as reasonable attorneys' fees under the protective provisions of that act.29
Third, the 1973 Legislature first considered, then rejected, an amendment to the Residential Landlord-Tenant Act of 1973 which by its express terms would have provided that violations "of the provisions of this chapter shall be construed, for the purposes of application of the Consumer *552Protection Act, chapter 19.86 RCW, to constitute an unfair or deceptive act or practice or an unfair method of competition in the conduct of trade or commerce."30 This amendment was considered on the floor of the Senate. Before the amendment was voted down, one senator questioned whether the Attorney General's office had sufficient staff to handle such a job, and another senator questioned the wisdom of opening the door to treble damages under the Consumer Protection Act when a double damages amendment had just been voted down.31 This demonstrates that the Senate was well aware of the effect of what it was doing when it turned down the amendment extending the Consumer Protection Act to violations of the Residential Landlord-Tenant Act of 1973; so too does the fact that this same Legislature enacted legislation expressly applying the Consumer Protection Act to other activities such as charitable solicitations32 and chain distribution schemes.33
It is the duty of this court to ascertain and give effect to the intent and purposes of the Legislature as expressed in its enactments. This court has held that the Consumer Protection Act "is not applicable and will not support a private action where there is a specific legislative declaration that the public does not have an interest in a particular subject matter." Anhold v. Daniels, 94 Wn.2d 40, 43, 614 P.2d 184 (1980), citing Brown v. Charlton, 90 Wn.2d 362, 583 P.2d 1188 (1978) with approval. That same reasoning applies where the Legislature has otherwise clearly evinced its intent that designated activities not be covered by the Consumer Protection Act as in this case.34
*553Based on the foregoing three reasons, we perceive the intent of the Legislature to have been that residential landlord-tenant problems not be included within the Consumer Protection Act, RCW 19.86, either directly through that act or indirectly through means of the Residential Landlord-Tenant Act of 1973, RCW 59.18, and the per se doctrine.35 Neither the statutory direction to liberally construe the Consumer Protection Act36 nor the right to resort to remedies "otherwise provided by law"37 as expressed in the Residential Landlord-Tenant Act of 1973, justify the judicial extension of a remedy at odds with a clearly demonstrated legislative intent to the contrary.
Thus, the trial court erred in holding as it did.
If, as argued by the Attorney General, it is important from a public policy standpoint for that office (and thereby for private litigants as well)38 to be empowered to proceed under the Consumer Protection Act for egregious violations of the Residential Landlord-Tenant Act of 1973, then the request for such authority should appropriately be addressed to the Legislature.
Reversed and dismissed.
Utter, Brachtenbach, Dolliver, Dimmick, and Pearson, JJ., concur.

Finding of fact 9.

RCW 19.86.090; RCW 19.86.080.

RCW 19.09.340.

RCW 19.102.020.

RCW 19.52.036.

RCW 19.105.500.

RCW 46.70.220.

RCW 49.60.030(3).

RCW 63.10.050.

RCW 64.36.170.

RCW 58.19.270.

RCW 18.28.185.

RCW 18.35.180.

RCW 18.39.350.

RCW 19.130.060.

RCW 19.86.080.

RCW 19.86.090.

Seaboard Sur. Co. v. Ralph Williams' Northwest Chrysler Plymouth, Inc., 81 Wn.2d 740, 746, 504 P.2d 1139 (1973).

Comment, State v. Reader's Digest Association — A Knockout Punch to Unfair or Deceptive Acts or Practices in Washington?, 10 Gonz. L. Rev. 529, 540 (1975); Comment, Washington Tenant Remedies and the Consumer Protection Act, 10 Gonz. L. Rev. 559 (1975); Clarke, Washington's Implied Warranty of Habitability: Reform or Illusion?, 14 Gonz. L. Rev. 1, 46 (1978).

Opening Brief of Respondent, at 23.

RCW 19.86.080.

RCW 19.86.090.

See Washington Consumer Advisory Council, Consumer Protection in the State of Washington (1960); Thirty-Fifth Biennial Report of the Attorney General, at 25-37 (1959-1960).

Laws of 1961, ch. 216, p. 1956. See, e.g., Senate Journal, 37th Legislature (1961), at 285-86, 288-89, 1158-62; House Journal, 37th Legislature (1961), at 1185-92.

See O'Connell, Washington Consumer Protection Act — Enforcement Provisions and Policies, 36 Wash. L. Rev. 279, 280 (1961).

Clarke, Washington's Implied Warranty of Habitability: Reform or Illusion?, 14 Gonz. L. Rev. 1, 11-12 (1978).

See generally People for Envtl. Progress v. Leisz, 373 F. Supp. 589 (C.D. Cal. 1974).

RCW 59.18.230(2)(a).

RCW 59.18.230(3).

Senate Journal, 43d Legislature, 1st Ex. Sess. (1973), at 1006.

Senate Journal, 43d Legislature, 1st Ex. Sess. (1973), at 1006-08.

Laws of 1973, 1st Ex. Sess., ch. 13, § 34; RCW 19.09.340.

Laws of 1973, 1st Ex. Sess., ch. 33, § 2; RCW 19.102.020.

See Donovan v. Hotel, Motel & Restaurant Employees Local 19, 700 F.2d 539, 545 n.8 (9th Cir. 1983) and the cases cited therein. See also 2A C. Sands, *553Statutory Construction § 48.18, at 234 (4th ed. 1973).

See generally Haner v. Quincy Farm Chems., Inc., 97 Wn.2d 753, 760-63, 649 P.2d 828 (1982).

RCW 19.86.920.

RCW 59.18.090(2).

See Lightfoot v. MacDonald, 86 Wn.2d 331, 334-36, 544 P.2d 88 (1976); Anhold v. Daniels, 94 Wn.2d 40, 44-45, 614 P.2d 184 (1980).