Court Opinion

ID: 9694963
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 18:02:01.549996+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:20:07.253771
License: Public Domain

Caporale, J.,
concurring in part, and in part dissenting.
I agree that the decision of the Department of Water Resources must be reversed in order that the director can consider the effects of the Prairie Bend Project. However, I disagree with the majority’s determination concerning Dr. Ann Bleed’s participation in this matter.
She not only coauthored a report which involved the central issue the director was to decide and examined witnesses, she may, or may not, have been a part of the decisionmaking process. If she was, her participation as a coauthor of the article on the central issue before the director would entitle a reasonable disinterested observer to conclude that she had in some measure adjudged the facts in controversy. Such a circumstance, arising in an adjudicative setting, would provide a due process basis for disqualifying her as a decisionmaker. See, e.g., American General Ins. Co. v. F. T. C., 589 F.2d 462 (9th Cir. 1979) (decision set aside because one commissioner had previously participated in case as counsel); Cinderella Career and Finishing Schools, Inc. v. F. T. C., 425 F.2d 583 (D.C. Cir. 1970) (public statements of commission chairman indicating some measure of prejudgment, combined with other errors, required vacation of order); American Cyanamid Company v.F. T. C., 363 F.2d 757 (6th Cir. 1966) (one who had served as counsel for Senate subcommittee investigating many of same facts and issues could not sit as commission chairman); Amos Treat & Co. v. Securities and Exchange Commission, 306 F.2d 260 (D.C. Cir. 1962), criticized, National Rifle Ass’n v. U. S. Postal Service, 407 F. Supp. 88 (D.C. 1976) (one who had *469participated as employee in investigation of charges could not sit as commission member).
In view of the department’s contradictory characterizations of Bleed’s role, the State of Wyoming should have been permitted to depose her in order to determine what that role in fact had been and was to be. I would therefore remand the entire matter for such to be done. If it were to develop that Bleed in fact served as a decisionmaker, I would vacate the entire order of the department and direct that proceedings begin anew.