The Fourth District Court of Appeal held that an affordable housing developer’s claims against the City of Colton arose from protected activity under California’s anti-SLAPP statute and that the developer could not show a probability of prevailing because it did not comply with the claim-presentation requirements of the Government Claims Act. Eagle Colton 55, LP v. City of Colton, 2026 WL 2097217 (4th Dist., July 21, 2026).
Eagle developed an affordable senior housing project in Colton with municipal financing. Years later, while Eagle was negotiating a similar project with the City of Yucaipa, Yucaipa staff contacted Colton officials about Eagle’s performance on the Colton project. Eagle claimed Colton’s finance director made false statements concerning Eagle’s compliance with its loan obligations and that those statements caused Yucaipa to reject its proposed project. Eagle sued Colton for interference with prospective economic relations, breach of the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing, and defamation, seeking lost profits in excess of $65 million.
Colton moved to strike the complaint under the anti-SLAPP statute, Code of Civil Procedure section 425.16. The court had little difficulty concluding that Eagle’s claims arose from protected activity. The challenged communications concerned Colton’s experience with Eagle’s project, municipal financing, and Yucaipa’s evaluation of a proposed affordable housing development. The court held that the proposed development and its municipal financing were matters of public interest and that communications among government officials concerning those issues constituted protected activity under the anti-SLAPP statute.
The case turned on the second step of the anti-SLAPP analysis—whether plaintiff had established a probability of prevailing on its claims. Colton asserted Eagle could not make this showing because it had failed properly to submit a claim under the Government Claims Act before filing suit. The Claims Act generally requires a person seeking money or damages from a public agency to present a written claim before commencing litigation. Colton argued that Eagle’s claim was not delivered or mailed to one of the officials or bodies designated under the Claims Act, such as the clerk, secretary, auditor, or governing body. Eagle countered that, before filing suit, its attorney had sent a letter concerning the dispute to Colton’s city attorney and that Eagle representatives later gave a copy of this letter to a city council member. Eagle maintained that delivery to the council member satisfied the Claims Act because he was a member of the City’s governing body.
The Court of Appeal rejected that argument on two grounds. First, a council member is not among the recipients authorized by the Claims Act to accept a claim on the City’s behalf. Second, delivery to one council member acting alone does not constitute actual receipt by the council as the City’s governing body. As a result, the court said Eagle had not met “its burden of establishing a reasonable probability of prevailing on the merits” and its suit should therefore be dismissed under the anti-SLAPP statute.
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The decision illustrates a potentially confusing feature of anti-SLAPP terminology. Courts frequently describe the second step in the analysis as whether the plaintiff has shown a “probability of prevailing on the merits.” Section 425.16, however, uses a broader formulation: whether “the plaintiff has established that there is a probability that the plaintiff will prevail on the claim.” The statute thus allows courts to consider evidence bearing on either the substantive validity of the claim or defenses to the claim. A procedural defense—such as the statute of limitations—can result in dismissal under the anti-SLAPP statute regardless of the merits of the claims. See Barry v. State Bar of California, 2 Cal.5th 318, 326–327 (2017) (anti-SLAPP motion may be granted for a “non-merits-based reason,” such as lack of jurisdiction.) The court in Eagle Colton applied that principle, ending its analysis with the finding that Eagle had failed to properly present the required claim, leaving the actual merits of Eagle’s suit unresolved.
