Hessen v. Metropolitan Dade County, 86-1259
| Decision Date | 06 October 1987 |
| Docket Number | No. 86-1259,86-1259 |
| Parties | 12 Fla. L. Weekly 2367 Penelope HESSEN, individually and on behelf of all others similarly situated, Appellants, v. METROPOLITAN DADE COUNTY, a political subdivision of the State of Florida, and Chemical Bank, a banking corporation organized under the laws of the State of New York, Appellees. |
| Court | Florida District Court of Appeals |
Jepeway and Jepeway and Louis M. Jepeway, Jr., Alan S. Polackwich, Sr., Vero Beach, for appellants.
Shutts & Bowen and M. Therese Vento, Miami, for appellee Chemical Bank.
Robert A. Ginsburg, Co. Atty., and Murray A. Greenberg, First Asst. Co. Atty., and Vicki J. Jay, Asst. Co. Atty., for appellee Metropolitan Dade County.
Before SCHWARTZ, C.J., and HENDRY and FERGUSON, JJ.
This appeal is brought from an order denying the maintenance of a lawsuit as a class action.
On March 1, 1981, Dade County sold $88,000,000 in Guaranteed Entitlement Bonds in denominations of $25,000 each with interest payable each year at the rate of nine percent. The three-year bonds provided that they could be redeemed by the County on any interest payment date not earlier than March 1, 1982.
The appellant, Hessen, who resides in Vero Beach, Florida, purchased four bonds totalling $100,000 through her agent at Bankers Trust in New York.
Pursuant to the redemption provision, Dade County redeemed the bonds on March 1, 1983, and remitted the full amount of money necessary to redeem, including principal and accrued interest to Chemical Bank, the paying agent for the Bonds. Notice of the redemption was published in the Miami Review, a business and legal publication which had a circulation of approximately 6,000 in 1983, and in the Bond Buyer, a publication whose 1,650 subscribers consisted of banking and investment institutions. The appellant was one of the twenty-one percent of the bondholders who did not respond to the redemption notice. For a year Chemical Bank held and used $14,000,000 of investments and interest belonging to Hessen and 562 other bondholders.
This action was brought as a class action seeking a "declaration" that the redemption notice was inadequate, that Chemical Bank was unjustly enriched thereby, and that appellant and the other bondholders who failed to respond to the redemption notice were entitled to one year's interest payment.
We hold at the outset that an order denying certification as a class action is appealable. Ero Properties, Inc. v. Cone, 395 So.2d 1264 (Fla. 3d DCA 1981); Kohl v. Bay Colony Club Condo, 385 So.2d 1028 (Fla. 4th DCA 1980); Cordell v. World Ins. Co., 352 So.2d 108 (Fla. 1st DCA 1977).
The parties agree that a class suit must satisfy at least four prerequisites in order to be certified as such: (1) the members of the class are numerous; (2) the questions of law and fact are common; (3) the claim of the representative party is typical of all members of the class; and (4) the representative p...
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...Jenkins v. Raymark, 782 F.2d 468 (5th Cir. 1986); Griffin v. Carlin, 755 F.2d 1516 (11th Cir. 1985); Hessen v. Metropolitan Dade Co., 513 So. 2d 1330 (Fla. 3d DCA 1987); Port Royal Inc. v. Conboy, 154 So. 2d 734 (Fla. 2d DCA 1963) (interests of representative plaintiffs must be co-extensive......