§ 1-2z

Citation: § 1-2z
Parent Document: PPC Realty, LLC v. Hartford, 350 Conn. 347 (2024)
Jurisdiction: Connecticut (state)
Effective Date: 2024-08-12
Original Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/10266509/ppc-realty-llc-v-hartford/ ↗

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action to take advantage, prematurely, of an affirmative
defense it might have if the defendant were to bring
a cause of action to recover relocation costs. If the
legislature had intended to permit a landlord to invoke
§ 8-270a affirmatively to seek to invalidate a lien, it
could have easily said so. See, e.g., 9 Pettipaug, LLC v.
Planning & Zoning Commission, 349 Conn. 268, 284,
316 A.3d 318 (2024). To agree with the plaintiff’s argu-
ment, we would have to graft language onto these stat-
utes that does not exist, which we decline to do. See
State v. Wilchinski, 242 Conn. 211, 232, 700 A.2d 1
(1997) (declining to graft language onto statutes).
The trial court allowed the plaintiff to use the affirma-
tive defense provided in § 8-270a offensively to dis-
charge the defendant’s lien for the sake of making the
provisions of the act, in its view, harmonious, and to
generate consistent outcomes across cases with similar
facts. Although courts should prioritize a harmonious
reading of different statutory provisions, we cannot set
aside the plain meaning of the terms the legislature
provided. See, e.g., Battersby v. Battersby, supra, 218
Conn. 470. Further, because § 8-270a and relevant por-
tions of §§ 8-268 and 8-270 were promulgated as part of
the same public act, we must assume that the legislature
intentionally omitted the use of a § 8-270a ground from
the act’s provisions involving liens. See Asylum Hill
Problem Solving Revitalization Assn. v. King, 277
Conn. 238, 256, 890 A.2d 522 (2006) (‘‘[when] a statute,
with reference to one subject contains a given provi-
sion, the omission of such provision from a similar
statute concerning a related subject . . . is significant
to show that a different intention existed’’ (internal quota-
tion marks omitted)).4
4
We note that, even if we determined that the statutory language in
question is in any way ambiguous, the relevant legislative history indicates
that the legislature passed § 8-270a and the lien provisions in §§ 8-268 and
8-270 with full awareness that landlords would still be liable to municipalities
in the first instance for relocation costs in circumstances under which
landlords were not at fault.
Page 12 CONNECTICUT LAW JOURNAL 0, 0

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