Opinion ID: 2330541
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Class Members Had an Adequate Remedy at Law.

Text: The class-action petitions fared no better with respect to the second criterion for an exception to the Anti-Injunction Act, the adequacy of any legal remedy. Our case law and persuasive federal case law establish that a taxpayer has an adequate legal remedy if she has a full opportunity to litigate [her] tax liability in a refund suit. Tolu, 906 A.2d at 277 (internal quotations and citations omitted). Under the scheme prescribed by D.C.Code § 47-825.01(f-1) and (j-1), property owners have such an opportunity. See Nat'l Trust for Historic Pres. v. District of Columbia, 498 A.2d 574, 576, 577 (D.C.1985) (noting that because the Tax Division may inquire into all relevant questions of law and fact, the real property taxation law provides adequate remedies to appellants.). As already noted, class members had an opportunity to contest their assessments in a first-level appeal to OTR and a second-level appeal to the BRPAA, and thereafter to file a refund suit if they remained aggrieved. [19] At each level they would have been entitled to raise all of their claims about why their assessments were invalid and to obtain de novo review. See Tolu, 906 A.2d at 277 (If the administrative agency acts arbitrarily in a tax refund suit, the courts are available on appeal to correct the unlawful action. This availability affords the petitioners an adequate remedy.); Square 345 Assocs. Ltd. P'shp. v. District of Columbia, 721 A.2d 963, 966 (D.C.1998) (It is within the trial court's broad discretion as the finder of fact to sift through the evidence and arrive at an independent valuation.); Wash. Post, 596 A.2d at 521 n. 2 ([W]hen a taxpayer appeals to the Superior Court, the case is subject to de novo evaluation . . . and the whole case, both facts and law, is open for consideration. (internal punctuation marks and citations omitted)); cf. Amos v. Glynn County Bd. Of Tax Assessors, 347 F.3d 1249, 1257-58 (11th Cir.2003) (state remedy was plain, speedy and efficient even if taxpayer had to resort first to administrative procedures and await de novo review by state trial court and appellate courts of constitutional issues). The administrative appeals/tax refund suit process afforded an adequate legal remedy not only for substantive challenges to the tax year 2002 assessment methodology, but also for any procedural claims property owners sought to raise. See Nat'l Trust for Historic Pres., 498 A.2d at 577 n. 4 (Appellants claim they have been injured by the procedures, rather than the assessment itself. We conclude that the correction of the assessment, if correction is warranted, with accompanying refund or credit, is an adequate remedy for any shortcomings in procedure.). Furthermore, the statutorily-prescribed appeal process afforded property owners opportunities to discover facts about the assessment methodology: Super. Ct. Tax R. 3(a) incorporates the general civil rules of procedure concerning discovery, thereby providing the taxpayer with adequate means to learn beforehand the methodology used by the District's assessor and prepare any challenge to its correctness. Moreover, although the administrative review procedures the taxpayer must pursue antecedently are informal and often non-adversarial . . ., they furnish an additional opportunity for the taxpayer to discover the basis of the assessment and initiate any attack upon it. YWCA of the Nat'l Capital Area, Inc. v. District of Columbia, 731 A.2d 849, 852 (D.C.1999) (internal quotation marks and citations omitted). Appellees focus on the refusal of OTR, the District's Chief Financial Officer, and the BRPAA Chair to respond to Craig's request that all affected propertiesnot just Craig's own propertybe re-assessed. However, a property owner's administrative appeal/refund suit remedy is not rendered inadequate simply because no taxpayer has the right to challenge the assessments of others or to obtain group-wide relief. The Supreme Court has recognized a general prohibition on a litigant's raising another person's legal rights, Nordlinger v. Hahn, 505 U.S. 1, 11, 112 S.Ct. 2326, 120 L.Ed.2d 1 (1992) (internal citation and quotation omitted), and Supreme Court precedent is unambiguous that a state court remedy may be `plain', even where the sole relief afforded by the state is an individual refund. . . . Amos, 347 F.3d at 1262 (citing California v. Grace Brethren Church, 457 U.S. 393, 416, 102 S.Ct. 2498, 73 L.Ed.2d 93 (1982), and Rosewell v. La Salle Nat'l Bank, 450 U.S. 503, 523, 101 S.Ct. 1221, 67 L.Ed.2d 464 (1981)). The fact that resort to the statutorily-prescribed administrative process may be time-consuming does not mean that the process affords an inadequate legal remedy. See Rosewell, 450 U.S. at 514, 521, 101 S.Ct. 1221 (construing the federal Tax Injunction Act and noting that the touchstone for whether a taxpayer has a plain, speedy, and efficient remedy is whether she is entitled to a full hearing and judicial determination at which she may raise any and all constitutional objections to the tax, and concluding that we cannot say that respondent's 2-year delay falls outside the boundary of a `speedy' remedy (internal quotations and citations omitted)); Long Island Lighting Co. v. Town of Brookhaven, 889 F.2d 428, 433 (2d Cir. 1989) (delays in excess of ten years which resulted in part from delays in state court administration did not undermine the proscription of the Tax Injunction Act). Finally, we note that the assessment methodology in dispute here is unlike the practice at issue in Green. In Green, the District had adopted a new debasement factor, i.e., the percentage of a property's assessed value that was subject to taxation, changing the percentage from 55% to 60%. See 310 A.2d at 851. The problem for aggrieved taxpayers was that while resort to the statutorily-prescribed appeal process could enable them to obtain a favorable adjustment in the assessed value of their properties, through that process they could obtain no relief from the increased debasement factor. Thus, the prescribed process did not afford an adequate remedy. See id. at 857 (fair market value was the only element of the tax formula to which taxpayers could meaningfully object through the administrative review process, meaning that with regard to the debasement factor, taxpayers were totally remediless within the normal avenue for seeking redress). This is not the case here. As shown by the example of petitioner Craig, a taxpayer who challenged his proposed assessment derived through use of the across-the-board neighborhood multipliers could obtain a new assessmentand complete relief from the effects of the disputed methodologythrough the administrative appeal/refund suit process.