1 day Ago By Nick McConnell
Several more Solano County landowners have settled in a case with California Forever in which they allegedly engaged in horizontal price fixing against the company. Included in the settlement are Ian and Margaret Anderson, longtime holdouts and vocal critics of California Forever. Mayrn Johnson, a daughter of Ian and Margaret Anderson, spoke at the Rio Vista town hall hosted by California Forever in December and asked California Forever CEO Jan Sramek to drop the lawsuit then and there to the applause of those gathered.
“Of course we talk to each other,” she said later in an interview. “Of course we have interacted with each other. The people that are named in this lawsuit are family even though we share different last names.
” The Andersons grow wheat, barley and canola in addition to sheep grazing, according to a KQED story from 2023, which notes that the Andersons used to farm about 10,000 acres and now farm about 3,500.” A statement from California Forever indicated that not all of the defendants in the case have settled. “We are happy to confirm that we have settled the price-fixing litigation with the majority of the remaining defendants,” the release reads.
“We believe that given the March 2024 ruling from the federal judge that ‘there was some sort of agreement among defendants to fix the price of land in Solano County’, the terms of the settlement were fair to all parties involved. We remain open to settling with the remaining defendants.” U.
S. District Court Judge Troy Nunley denied a motion to dismiss filed by the Solano residents earlier this year. California Forever has alleged that the other landholders conspired to fix the price of land while their parent company, Flannery Associates, was purchasing large swaths of land for an undisclosed reason between 2017-2023.
“Specifically, Plaintiff alleges Defendants shared information with each other about price negotiations with Plaintiff regarding their land, colluded about how much they should sell their land to Plaintiff for, and collectively refused to sell their land for anything less than supra-competitive prices,” the March ruling reads. “Plaintiff also alleges Defendants’ conspiracy affected other Solano County landowners’ decisions to sell their properties to Plaintiff.” Richard Hamilton, a landowner in the area and defendant in the case, sent a text message to a member of the Anderson Family, which California Forever’s lawyers argue is direct evidence of horizontal price fixing between entities.
“In talking with Ian Anderson, he agrees that the remaining property owners should be in agreement on what we would want to sell our properties,” the text read according to court records. “So [Plaintiff’s Attorney] cannot play owners against owners. I think we should have a meeting in the next two weeks to talk about [Plaintiff].
” Under the precedent on this issue, the company must only prove that it is “plausible” that the landowners broke the Sherman Antitrust Act to keep the case from being dismissed. “Ultimately, a court may not dismiss a complaint in which the plaintiff has alleged “enough facts to state a claim to relief that is plausible on its face,” the ruling reads. Nunley’s judgment indicates that he found sufficient plausibility that the defendants attempted to decide not only how much to sell for, but when.
In an email communication including a group of defendants in the case, Susan Beebe Furay wrote that the “aggressive” manner of California Forever was an indication that the late sellers had the upper hand, and encouraged others not to sell. “No one is suggesting that we don’t sell, the question is when and at what price,” the email allegedly reads. “Several of the other major landowners in the area are basically taking their time as well and not engaging with [Plaintiff].
” Sramek said after the Rio Vista town hall last year that the lawsuit involves a small fraction of the people California Forever has done business with, and he claimed it’s evident that they broke the law. This suit, he alleged, was about a small group of landowners who conspired for their personal gain. “I think it’s quite clear,” Sramek said.
“There are hundreds of people here who didn’t sell and they are not getting sued, and there are 600 people who we bought from and we are not suing them.” Santa Clara University law professor and antitrust expert Donald Polden told the San Jose Mercury News earlier this year that, despite the ruling, the case was still an uphill battle for California Forever. To win, he said, the company would have to “come forward and say, ‘Here’s how the conspiracy really worked and here’s how the (property owners) engaged in a common enterprise to achieve a market-wide increase of land prices in Solano County.
’”.
