Opinion ID: 1033521
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Evidence of Actual Bias

Text: We consider whether Today‟s Fresh Start has presented “specific evidence” (Morongo Band of Mission Indians v. State Water Resources Control Bd., supra, 45 Cal.4th at p. 741) that this is the “exceptional case” (People v. Freeman, supra, 47 Cal.4th at p. 1005) involving a constitutionally unacceptable risk of actual bias. Today‟s Fresh Start identifies two points of structural overlap between the County Office and its governing board, the County Board. Superintendent Robles recommended revocation based on the County Office‟s investigation; as county superintendent she was also, by statute, the ex officio secretary and executive officer of the County Board. (§ 1010.) Additionally, Shari Kim Gale was general counsel for both the County Office and its governing board. As well, the school relies on remarks it contends demonstrate the County Board over-relied on staff and failed to act as a neutral adjudicator. We find no due process violation. In Griggs v. Board of Trustees (1964) 61 Cal.2d 93, we held that where a school district‟s superintendent recommended a sanction against a party and thereafter took no role in the adjudicator‟s decision whether to impose the recommended sanction, no constitutional difficulties arose. There, a teacher challenged as a violation of due process the administrative proceedings that led to her termination. The school district‟s superintendent filed an accusation; thereafter, the school district‟s board of trustees (of which the superintendent was the chief executive officer) afforded the teacher a hearing and upheld the termination. The board of trustees was permitted to presume the superintendent‟s recommendation was correct—subject to reevaluation in light of the hearing evidence—and was permitted to conduct the hearing itself without relying on an 26 outside hearing officer. (Id. at pp. 97-98.) The superintendent did not participate in the deliberations; that separation of functions was sufficient. (Id. at pp. 98-99.) So too here, Superintendent Robles had a statutory duty to monitor and, if concerns arose, investigate Today‟s Fresh Start‟s operations. (§ 47604.4, subd. (a).) Based on that investigation, she ultimately recommended revocation of Today‟s Fresh Start‟s charter. Notwithstanding her ex officio title as executive officer of the County Board, she had no role in the board‟s adjudicative processes and did not participate in the vote on whether to revoke Today‟s Fresh Start‟s charter. Her actions thus pose no due process problem. The same is true of the actions of Sheri Kim Gale, general counsel of both the County Office and the board. Today‟s Fresh Start repeatedly characterizes her as a prosecutor, but this misstates both the nature of the proceedings and Gale‟s role. The County Board was charged with considering and weighing the fruits of the staff investigation and what it showed in favor of and against revocation, as well as the argument and evidence of Today‟s Fresh Start. Statutorily, the County Office and County Board had no agenda, no stake in one outcome or the other. Thus, like many administrative proceedings the United States Supreme Court and we have previously approved, this was not a classic adversarial hearing, with a prosecutor and a defendant. There was no prosecutor here. Gale presented no evidence, examined no witnesses, and made no argument in favor of revocation. Instead, Gale‟s role was to advise the County Board on its duties in deciding whether to direct charter revocation, just as she had previously advised County Office staff as to their powers and responsibilities when conducting an investigation of Today‟s Fresh Start. In neither capacity was she charged with being an advocate or an adjudicator. The four cases Today‟s Fresh Start principally relies upon to establish that Gale‟s actions violated due process are each inapposite. 27 In Howitt v. Superior Court, supra, 3 Cal.App.4th 1575, the same county counsel‟s office represented the county against an employee in a grievance proceeding and was prepared to advise the quasi-independent adjudicatory body tasked with deciding the grievance. The Court of Appeal concluded this dual role was permissible, but only if a screening procedure between prosecutors and advisors was instituted to avoid the specter of “a hearing in which [a single attorney] representing a county department raises an objection and then excuses himself from counsel table to consult with the Board members as to whether the objection should be sustained.” (Id. at p. 1582.) Unlike the county counsel‟s office in Howitt, Gale was not tasked with defending her agency‟s past actions before a third party adjudicator she simultaneously advised; rather, she was advising a unitary agency on the fulfillment of its statutory responsibilities in overseeing a regulated entity. Neither the United States Supreme Court nor we have held that due process requires subdivision of that role into separate parts. Golden Day Schools, Inc. v. State Dept. of Education (2000) 83 Cal.App.4th 695 involved a transparent due process violation: the same person who initiated the refusal to renew a government contract sat on the appellate panel that reviewed that administrative action (id. at p. 701) and thus “was in the position of judging the correctness of his own decision” (id. at p. 710). Of course, “ „[n]o man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause; because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity.‟ ” (Caperton v. A. T. Massey Coal Co., supra, 556 U.S. at p. 876, quoting Madison, The Federalist No. 10 (Cooke ed. 1961) p. 59; see In re Murchison (1955) 349 U.S. 133, 136.) The proceedings here involved no similar overlap; the County Board was deciding in the first instance whether to revoke a charter, not reviewing a decision already reached by one or another of its own board members. 28 In Nightlife Partners, Ltd. v. City of Beverly Hills (2003) 108 Cal.App.4th 81, the same legal counsel represented a city in connection with a business permit denial and then advised the third party hearing officer on administrative appeal from that denial. This violated due process because the attorney was in a position to advise on legal rulings and evidentiary objections in the adversarial appeal of an initial decision he had helped obtain. (Id. at pp. 90-94.) Gale was not involved in the appeal of a decision she had helped obtain; rather, she was counseling the County Board, as she had County Office staff, in connection with the same task: the initial decision whether Today‟s Fresh Start‟s charter should be revoked. Finally, in Quintero v. City of Santa Ana (2003) 114 Cal.App.4th 810, the Court of Appeal followed Howitt v. Superior Court, supra, 3 Cal.App.4th 1575, in concluding that the same public counsel‟s office can both represent one party in a contested hearing and advise the third party adjudicator, so long as sufficient separation is put in place between the advocate and adjudicator. In Quintero, the plaintiff was discharged from city employment and his discharge was upheld on appeal by an independent administrative board. Because counsel for the city in the appeal had an extensive history advising the independent administrative board adjudicating the appeal of the city‟s decision to dismiss its employee, the Court of Appeal found a due process violation. (Quintero, at pp. 815-817.) As with Nightlife Partners, Ltd. v. City of Beverly Hills, supra, 108 Cal.App.4th 81, an attorney‟s role in the conduct of an appeal conflicted with his earlier role. No similar appeal is at issue here. Next, Today‟s Fresh Start cites remarks by one board member, Angie Papadakis, that allegedly establish the County Board as a whole gave excess deference to the County Office staff and its recommendations. Referring to a County Office staff report and three volumes of supporting documentation concerning Today‟s Fresh Start‟s compliance with its charter and state law, 29 Papadakis indicated she “value[d] the work and the responsibility of the staff that spent all this time looking—compiling three books of what they discovered, what they are responsible for, what their job was” and “I did not pile through those three books, those three—you know, I did not go through those.” To the extent Today‟s Fresh Start relies on these remarks to assert that Papadakis, or the board as a whole, simply rubber-stamped the recommendations of the County Office staff without independently considering all the evidence or the presentation and arguments of the school, they cannot bear the weight of that argument. The comments were made at the October 16, 2007, meeting at which the board first authorized issuance of notice to Today‟s Fresh Start of an intent to revoke its charter. They preceded by weeks the November 6 public hearing at which the school presented evidence and argument, the November 20 meeting at which the board again considered the matter, the December 4 meeting at which the County Office presented its final report and the school again presented argument, and the December 11 meeting at which the County Board finally voted on revocation. The board and its individual members had ample time between October 16 and December 11 to consider all sides and all the evidence before reaching their own conclusion. More generally, reliance on agency staff to investigate a matter does not disqualify a board or commission from thereafter ruling impartially. In Kloepfer v. Commission on Judicial Performance (1989) 49 Cal.3d 826, for example, a judge argued that the Commission on Judicial Performance was tainted because its own staff had conducted the initial investigation and recommended initiation of proceedings. We rejected the due process challenge, noting that these facts failed to demonstrate “actual bias” and the argument was “contrary to existing authority.” (Id. at p. 833; see, e.g., Withrow v. Larkin, supra, 421 U.S. at p. 54, fn. 20; Griggs v. Board of Trustees, supra, 61 Cal.2d at pp. 97-98; F. T. C. v. 30 Cinderella Career and Finishing Schools, Inc. (D.C. Cir. 1968) 404 F.2d 1308, 1315.) Reliance on staff necessarily implies a degree of confidence in, and gratitude for, the work individuals perform in accumulating evidence and developing recommendations. The board member‟s comments demonstrate no more than that. Finally, Today‟s Fresh Start points to remarks County Office and County Board Counsel Gale made at a November 20, 2007, meeting as proof of the board‟s partiality. In a November 19 letter, Today‟s Fresh Start argued that County Office staff‟s participation in investigating the school and recommending revocation violated due process. It further argued that due process forbade any communication between County Office staff and the County Board concerning the revocation, and asked the board to “advise staff that they may not communicate, directly or indirectly, with the Board regarding the revocation.” At the next day‟s meeting, a board member sought a response from legal counsel. Gale explained that staff were not acting as adversarial advocates seeking to persuade an adjudicator, but as advisers to the entity statutorily charged in the first instance with authorizing and, when necessary, deciding to revoke a school‟s charter and, accordingly, that ex parte contacts were entirely permissible: “This is your charter school. [¶] In this matter the superintendent and staff are not the authorizer, and in our capacity we all advise the board in making this very important decision. It is not [County Office] staff versus [Today’s Fresh Start]’s staff. The legal burden is on you, the board of [the County Office], to determine whether there is substantial evidence to revoke your charter school. [¶] The [Education Code] provides for an appeal to the State Board of Education, and that is the due process stage. It is at that stage where there should be no one-sided communications, each side should have independent counsel. And most important, the adjudicator is the State Board of Ed[ucation], and it is neutral. In this matter, in this process, you are not 31 neutral. You are the authorizer. [¶] Essentially this is the same process we use to evaluate new petitions that come to this board. We use literally the same spectrum of expert—technical expert staff, there is a public hearing, there is a report of staff, and then there is a recommendation upon which our board votes. [¶] So with all due respect, we do disagree and still maintain that our process is entirely legal.” (Italics added.) Today‟s Fresh Start‟s position, that County Office staff‟s participation in investigating and offering a recommendation violated due process, was incorrect, as we have explained. Its position that the staff were advocates, and thus that the board should be prohibited from communicating with its own staff, was similarly incorrect. (See Morongo Band of Mission Indians v. State Water Resources Control Bd., supra, 45 Cal.4th at pp. 738-739 [“ „[s]eparation of functions must be defined and administered in ways that permit decisionmakers access to needed staff advice except in cases where the adviser has significant adversarial involvement in the case under decision.‟ ”].) In context, it is apparent Gale was arguing not that the County Board was partial, but that its relationship with its own staff was not that of a neutral adjudicator presiding over an adversarial hearing, and thus the board was not prohibited from ex parte contacts with staff members, who were acting as advisors rather than as distinct party-advocates. In that estimation, she was correct.11 11 Notably, the County Board member Gale was responding to, Leslie GilbertLurie, then offered her own understanding of the board‟s role and relationship with staff in light of Gale‟s remarks: “It‟s how I interpret our role. You‟re our staff, and so it‟s not a matter of our team versus another team. We form the best opinions we can make based on the information we gather through our own questions and through the information our staff brings us.” Quite properly, the County Board did not see its staff‟s role as prosecutorial or even distinct from the (footnote continued on next page) 32 At its heart, Today‟s Fresh Start‟s argument rests on the notion that engaging in an administrative investigation and forming opinions based on the fruits of that investigation yields the sort of extrinsic bias the due process clause was intended to prohibit. That view has long been repudiated. To choose but one example, the United States Supreme Court in Trade Comm’n v. Cement Institute (1948) 333 U.S. 683 considered the constitutionality of the Federal Trade Commission‟s structure. Charged with preventing unfair methods of competition, the commission investigated business practices in the cement industry, issued a complaint, held a formal hearing, and issued a cease and desist order. An industry trade group challenged the order, arguing that the commission was biased by its investigation, had prejudged the matter, and could not serve as an impartial adjudicator. The Supreme Court disagreed. Even assuming that the entire commission had formed the view, based on its investigation, that the cement industry was engaged in unlawful price fixing, that view did not prevent members of the cement industry from producing voluminous evidence, presenting testimony and argument, and persuading the commission to revise its conclusions. (Id. at p. 701.) Congress intended to establish a unitary administrative agency whose members would develop expertise with respect to the industries they oversaw. Its model was permissible and did not require the commission to disqualify itself from adjudicating matters it had previously investigated. (Id. at pp. 702-703.) So too here; the Legislature can charge county superintendents, offices of education, and their governing boards with oversight of charter schools without having to outsource adjudication of charter violations and other alleged (footnote continued from previous page) board‟s, but as advisorial to a disinterested board charged with arriving at the “best opinion[]” as to whether revocation was warranted. 33 misfeasance. Combining these functions in a unitary agency offers the advantage of ensuring familiarity and expertise. (See, e.g., Trade Comm’n v. Cement Institute, supra, 333 U.S. at p. 702; Blinder, Robinson & Co., Inc. v. S.E.C. (D.C. Cir. 1988) 837 F.2d 1099, 1107.) That a county office is responsible for investigating potential violations does not thereafter preclude the county office‟s governing board from neutrally evaluating the full range of evidence and argument a given charter school may wish to present at the required public hearing, and when warranted revising any tentative opinions the county office‟s initial investigation may have led the board to form. Considering the record as a whole, we conclude the evidence Today‟s Fresh Start presents establishes neither actual bias nor an unconstitutional risk of actual bias.