Iowa Supreme Court rules Davenport employees can be sued after 2023 building collapse

The Iowa Supreme Court ruled Davenport employees are not immune from liability in a lawsuit after the deadly partial collapse of a downtown apartment building in May 2023.

Supreme Court Justices heard oral arguments in early October in a lawsuit brought against the city of Davenport, contractors, engineers and the building's owner by the family estates of the three men who were killed in the May 28, 2023, partial building collapse, those who were injured and others who were displaced from the building.

In April 2024, a district court judge rejected the city's legal effort to have two city employees, former chief building official Trishna Pradhan and director of development and neighborhood services Rich Oswald, removed from the lawsuit, and ruled the employees did not have qualified immunity. The city appealed the case to the Iowa Supreme Court.

The city asserted the claims against the employees were barred by the qualified immunity provisions in Iowa Code 670.4.

The Supreme Court upheld the district court's decision, dismissing the city's appeal in an opinion filed Friday.

Justice Matthew McDermott delivered the opinion of the court, which was unanimous by participating justices.

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Justices Thomas Waterman and Edward Mansfield did not participate in considering or deciding the case, according to the ruling.

Generally, state code makes a municipality liable for claims brought against officers and employees acting within the scope of their employment, according to the ruling.

In 2021, the state Legislature amended the state code to add a new qualified immunity protection that made municipalities immune from liability for certain claims against them, requiring heightened pleading requirements for people bringing lawsuits.

The city argued that those higher requirements weren't met by those bringing the suit and that the petition failed to plead a "plausible violation" of "clearly established" law, according to the ruling.

City defendants also argued the claims alleged against them — common law negligence and nuisance — failed because the city defendants owed no duty to the plaintiffs based on the public-duty doctrine, under which a governmental entity generally cannot be held liable for an individual plaintiff's injury from a breach of duty owed to the public at large.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs argued that neither the qualified immunity protections nor the public-duty doctrine applied to the claims against the city.

The district court found that while those protections did apply to common law tort claims, those bringing the suit met the heightened requirements and the public-duty doctrine did not bar the lawsuit from moving forward.

The city appealed to the Iowa Supreme Court both the court's rulings on qualified immunity and separately the public-duty doctrine.

The Supreme Court viewed those two issues as distinct and on Friday ruled only on the claim for immunity. The appeal on public-duty doctrine had already been denied.

The city argued that the 2021 immunity protections state code defines tort as including negligence, meaning qualified immunity must apply to negligence claims.

The plaintiffs argued that state code chapter does not apply because it was intended to apply only to claims for constitutional or statutory violations, not to common law tort claims.

The Iowa Supreme Court resolved a similar question in prior cases, 1000 Friends of Iowa v. Polk County Board of Supervisors and Doe v. Western Dubuque Community School District, according to the justices' Friday ruling.

In the latter, the court held that qualified immunity applies only where the plaintiff has asserted a state constitutional tort claim or statutory claim and not where the plaintiff has asserted a common law claim, according to the ruling.

In the collapse case, justices wrote that the plaintiffs' claims are for common law negligence and nuisance, not a claim under the state constitution or the violation of a specific statutory right.

"We take the petition's negligence claims here as negligence claims, not as claims pursuing a private cause of action to enforce a 'right … secured by law'. … The qualified immunity provisions in 670.4A do not apply to the common law tort claims asserted against the City defendants in this case. And because 670.4A does not apply, the City defendants' appeal under its provisions necessarily fails," the justices wrote.

The city of Davenport declined to comment, citing pending litigation.