Opinion ID: 2040616
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Failure to Require DPC to Make More Complete Answers to Petitioner's Interrogatories.

Text: Petitioner claims that he was unfairly prejudiced by the hearing officer's failure to require DPC to answer more completely the interrogatories he propounded following the initial hearing and prior to the reopened hearing. Section 17A.13 provides that discovery as applicable to civil actions is available for purposes of administrative contested case procedure under chapter 17A. We interpret this to mean that, as in civil actions under our rules of civil procedure, challenges to responses made to discovery requests are to be resolved on an abuse of discretion standard. See, e.g., Cave v. Fountain, 258 Iowa 1232, 1235, 142 N.W.2d 436, 438 (1966). The administrative officials responsible for assuring the fairness of the hearing process, see section 17A.11, are responsible to make such determinations within their sound discretion. The interrogatories to which petitioner's complaints relate were filed on March 9, 1982, eleven days after the hearing officer had agreed to reopen the hearing. They consisted of eighteen questions, some with several subparts. The questions for the most part called for highly technical data bearing on (a) the extent of DPC's perceived voltage drop problems in the project area, (b) the extent of DPC's perceived need for an additional power source to solve outage problems in the area, (c) alternative means available to solve these problems to the extent they exist, and (d) the cost-effectiveness of these various alternatives. DPC responded to these interrogatories with hundreds of pages of data, much of it in oversized, computer printout form. At the hearing on petitioner's motion to compel more complete answers to the interrogatories, DPC responded on the basis that all factual data in its possession bearing on the subject matter of the interrogatories had been made available to petitioner. The hearing officer, after soliciting the views of the commission staff, accepted such response as adequate and denied petitioner's request for further answers. Petitioner urges that the thrust of his motion to compel more responsive answers was in regard to DPC's analysis in arriving at the conclusions which it held with respect to the need for the proposed project. Availability of factual data does not, petitioner asserts, satisfy his need for such analysis in order to employ experts to refute DPC's conclusions. We agree that many of petitioner's interrogatories did seek such analysis rather than the raw data on which the conclusions were based. Many of DPC's answers were, to this extent, unresponsive. Petitioner's motion to compel answers was coupled with a motion for continuance. It clearly would have been necessary to grant the latter motion if further discovery were to be compelled. Notwithstanding any inadequacies in DPC's response to petitioner's interrogatories, we cannot conclude that the hearing officer abused his discretion in determining to move ahead toward an expeditious conclusion of an already lengthy administrative process. This conclusion is buttressed by the fact that petitioner had sought no discovery prior to the initial hearing, and the reopened hearing was for a limited purpose. We have no basis on the present record to know whether more responsive answers to the interrogatories would have significantly aided petitioner in impeaching the conclusions of DPC's witnesses. Certainly, to some extent, the same foundation for impeachment was available to petitioner through cross-examination of the same persons who would have answered the challenged interrogatories on DPC's behalf. Such cross-examination could have been undertaken by petitioner prior to the time that his own expert witnesses testified. In totality, we cannot conclude that the fundamental fairness of the hearing process was sufficiently thwarted as a result of the unresponsive answers to interrogatories to require that the agency action be disturbed on judicial review.