Opinion ID: 2525038
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: the district court retained jurisdiction to enforce its march 5, 1997 judgment entered in the class' favor

Text: ¶ 13 We begin with a statement of the obvious. Persons who are not parties to an administrative adjudication from which the appealed agency order emanates have no standing to seek review of that order in an appellate proceeding. [16] The record demonstrates that class members  other than Dewey and Riddle  were not named, nor did they participate, in the Board's adjudication of Dewey's administrative claim. Hence, under the OAPA's relevant provisions [17] the class members do not qualify as parties to the individual proceeding on the claim and cannot seek appellate review of the agency's final order entered in the same. This is not to say that firefighters like-situated to Dewey have no avenue of redress for perceived harm to their rights to receive statutorily-authorized, military-service credits. ¶ 14 The record demonstrates that class members  except Dewey and Riddle  did not file administrative claims seeking the benefit of the statutorily-prescribed, military-service credit even though they held vested interests in the firefighters retirement system and were potentially entitled to the credit. They can with certainty be said not to have exhausted available administrative remedies before bringing their district court action. Nonetheless, while the common law requires parties to first exhaust available administrative remedies before seeking redress in the district courts, [18] exhaustion is not required in all cases, such as when administrative remedies are inadequate, ineffective or unavailable. [19] ¶ 15 The court's analysis in Allen v. State, 1988 OK 99, 769 P.2d 1302, is instructive in understanding the essence of the class' district-court petition. The Allen Court recognized a class' right to bring a district-court-declaratory-judgment suit [20] under the OAPA's provisions from a de facto agency rule  i.e., a rule which is definite enough to represent the agency's position on a particular subject but is not the product of the formal rulemaking process. [21] A general prerequisite for bringing such a suit is substantial harm to the class' rights by the (de facto) agency rule. In Allen the Court found that an agency's obedience to the legal advice of the Attorney General  whether considered binding or merely advisory  effected adoption of the Attorney General's opinion as a rule. [22] This is understandable when one comprehends that a state agency is deemed protected from liability when it proceeds upon the basis of the state's chief law officer's advice. [23] Here, the record documents that Board relied upon informal advice from the Attorney General [24] to support its denial of military-service credits to firefighters who held vested interests in the retirement system. After Board's adoption of the Attorney General's advice as a basis for its legal response to claims for military-service credits, the procedural remedy of a declaratory-relief suit afforded by the OAPA § 306 was available to the class to test the validity of the agency's de facto rule. To require class members to file individual claims as a predicate to seeking redress from Board's asserted legal position on military-service credits would have in essence required class members to do a vain and useless act. [25] This neither the law nor equity will do. [26] ¶ 16 The above characterization of the class members' petition is critical to resolution of today's appeal. We have undertaken our analysis not to revisit the provisions of the district court's March 5, 1997 declaratory judgment but rather to afford insight into the true nature of, and hence jurisdictional basis for, the district court's February 12, 1999 order. It is only when the latter's character as a postjudgment enforcement order [as to the class' rights] is understood that the district court's authority to enter the same becomes apparent. Oklahoma extant jurisprudence teaches that if a trial court possesses the jurisdiction needed to render judgment, it has authority and power to enforce the same and give it effect. [27] Since the district court was vested with jurisdiction over the class' declaratory-relief suit, it has the power to enter a postjudgment order enforcing its judgment in the same.