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MARY L. HALL and EUGENE HALL, Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. SPENCER COUNTY, KENTUCKY, et al., Defendants-Appellees. |
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Appeal from the United States District Court
for the Western District of Kentucky at Louisville.
No. 06-00189—John G. Heyburn II, Chief District Judge.
Argued: October 6, 2009
Decided and Filed: October 20, 2009
Before: MARTIN, COLE, and KETHLEDGE, Circuit Judges.
BOYCE F. MARTIN, JR., Circuit Judge. Appellants Mary Lou and Eugene Hall, owners of a towing service, brought a 42 U.S.C. § 1983 action. They sought declaratory relief, injunctive relief and damages arising from an alleged reduction of “wrecker-run” assignments. They claim an outsourced emergency dispatcher removed them from a rotation list. In their original complaint, the Halls alleged due process claims against appellees Russell and Marlene Cranmer, Spencer County, Kentucky and Taylorsville, Kentucky, alleging, inter alia, that they had impermissibly reduced and suspended assignment of wrecker calls to the Halls. Following discovery, the Halls moved for leave to file an amended complaint replacing all claims based on the bid contract award, instead alleging that the defendants had reduced the wrecker assignments to them in retaliation for their public complaints about the outsourced dispatcher and the instant litigation. The district court granted the motion but found that the claims asserted in the amended complaint were sufficiently different from the claims in the original complaint that they were not entitled to relation-back to the original filing date under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 15(c). The district court found that the “new” claims were thus time-barred under the applicable Kentucky statute of limitations. It dismissed the federal claims with prejudice and remanded the remaining state law claims in the amended complaint to the Circuit Court of Spencer County, Kentucky. The Halls appealed this judgment.
After reviewing the two complaints, we conclude that the claims asserted in the amended complaint were based on the same “conduct, transaction or occurrence” as the claims in the original complaint: the reduction of wrecker calls by the Cranmers to the Halls. Fed. R. Civ. Pro. 15(c)(1)(B). We thus find that the claims in the amended complaint relate back to the claims in the original complaint and were thus filed within the statute of limitations. For the following reasons, we REVERSE the judgment of the district court.