Douglas Bruce v. City of Miamisburg, Ohio

• Court: Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit
• Decided: October 11, 2023
• Docket: 23-3080
• Status: Unpublished

Opinion

NOT RECOMMENDED FOR PUBLICATION File Name: 23a0432n.06

No. 23-3080

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT FILED Oct 11, 2023 ) DEBORAH S. HUNT, Clerk DOUGLAS BRUCE, ) Plaintiff-Appellant, ) ON APPEAL FROM THE v. ) UNITED STATES DISTRICT ) COURT FOR THE SOUTHERN CITY OF MIAMISBURG, OHIO, ) DISTRICT OF OHIO ) OPINION Defendant-Appellee. ) )

Before: KETHLEDGE, THAPAR, and MATHIS, Circuit Judges.

KETHLEDGE, Circuit Judge. Douglas Bruce sued the City of Miamisburg for

demolishing, as public nuisances, two buildings that Bruce had bought but never maintained. The

district court granted summary judgment to the City on limitations grounds. We affirm.

We view the evidence in the light most favorable to Bruce. See Troche v. Crabtree,

814 F.3d 795, 798 (6th Cir. 2016). Bruce lives in Colorado Springs and owns about 50 properties

in nine states. In 2013, he purchased two buildings in Miamisburg, Ohio, located at 609 and 621

Cherry Hill Drive. Yet he never visited these buildings or hired anyone to maintain them. Over

the next few years, the City attempted to send any number of notices to Bruce about the buildings’

condition: that their lawns were unmowed, that trash and debris surrounded them, that the

buildings had become public nuisances, and eventually that the buildings had been condemned. No. 23-3080, Bruce v. City of Miamisburg, Ohio

In September 2017, the City mailed to Bruce’s post-office box in Colorado Springs two

notices of the City’s intention to demolish the buildings. Those notices were returned as

undeliverable, even though Bruce checked that post-office box daily and had used that address for

receiving notices regarding his properties for some 36 years. (The City also sent notices of the

demolition to Bruce at a Colorado state prison, but apparently he had been released by then.) The

City also posted notices of the impending demolition on the building’s front doors, and repeatedly

published such notices in five local newspapers between September 2017 and April 2018. Yet the

City never heard a word from Bruce; and by July 2018 the City had demolished the buildings.

The first time the City did hear from Bruce, apparently, is when he filed this lawsuit, in

March 2021, more than two years after the buildings’ demolition. Although § 1983 does not

specify a limitations period—it borrows them from state law—the parties here agree that the

applicable limitations period was two years. See Beaver St. Invs. v. Summit Cnty., 65 F.4th 822,

826 (6th Cir. 2023). That period began to run when Bruce knew or had “reason to know of the

injury which is the basis of his action.” Id. “A plaintiff has reason to know of his injury when he

should have discovered it through the exercise of reasonable diligence.” Johnson v. Memphis Light

Gas & Water Div., 777 F.3d 838, 843 (6th Cir. 2015) (internal quotation marks omitted).

Bruce’s suit was timely, therefore, only if he had no reason to know by March 2019 that

his buildings had been demolished. We set to one side all the notices that the City sent to Bruce

at a post-office box address that Bruce himself testified that he had used daily for 36 years; perhaps

a jury could believe that these particular notices somehow did not reach him there. For suffice it

to say that by March 2019, as the district court rightly observed, a reasonable property owner—

one who made any effort at all to stay apprised of his buildings’ condition, for example, and to

ensure that they remained in compliance with the municipal code—would have known that, for

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the past six months or so, his buildings had lain in heaps of rubble. Bruce’s suit was therefore

untimely, and the district court was right to grant summary judgment.

The district court’s judgment is affirmed.

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