Court Opinion

ID: 9522912
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 02:33:39.976685+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:04:16.699423
License: Public Domain

JUSTICE HARTMAN, specially concurring and dissenting: I concur with the majority in that portion of the opinion which upholds the circuit court’s construction of “available” funds; however, I respectfully dissent from the majority’s reversal of the circuit court’s order annexing proration principles onto IDEA Rule 3.387. The IDEA rules at issue here may be individually proper exercises of administrative authority under the Code and are not constitutionally infirm, yet the combined and potentially devastating effect of their inflexible application in the instant case required some ameliorative response by the circuit court. In my opinion, the order requiring proration of the settlement deduction was such a response. Here, a disabled father of seven, physically incapable of supporting his family through employment, applied for SSI and GA benefits. He authorized IDEA to deduct from any SSI lump-sum settlement the GA benefits he had already received. In November 1983, plaintiff was sent the balance of his SSI settlement from IDEA, after it had made its deduction. No notice from IDEA of the potential consequences of plaintiff’s receipt of the check accompanied the settlement check. While such contemporaneous notice may not have been constitutionally mandated, simple justice and fairness would seem to require such notice, especially where, as here, the settlement was channeled through IDEA itself, and was not sent by SSA directly to plaintiff. Nevertheless, plaintiff was not notified until January 1984 that his GA benefits would be terminated because of the settlement. The settlement funds, however, were then no longer available to support the family. Although plaintiff may have been improvident in spending these funds, notwithstanding the lack of prior notice, the subsequent application by IDPA of its Rule 3.387, requiring the termination of GA benefits in whole months, would have worked a substantial hardship on this family. The rules and regulations promulgated by an administrative agency are presumptively valid; nevertheless, a reviewing court may set them aside if they are clearly arbitrary, capricious, or unreasonable. (Illinois Coal Operators Association v. Pollution Control Board (1974), 59 Ill. 2d 305, 310, 319 N.E.2d 782; Midwest Petroleum Marketers Association v. City of Chicago (1980), 82 Ill. App. 3d 494, 501, 402 N.E.2d 709.) The rules which permitted the IDPA here to send a lump-sum settlement to plaintiff without affording him contemporaneous notice of the stark consequences thereof, and then, two months later to notify him that all GA benefits would be discontinued for five months, are both unfair and unreasonable. Although due process of law requires only that the opportunity to be heard be provided, “[i]t is an opportunity which must be granted at a meaningful time and in a meaningful manner.” (Armstrong v. Manzo (1965), 380 U.S. 545, 552, 14 L. Ed. 2d 62, 66, 85 S. Gt. 1187, 1191.) The notice and hearing provided here, after the settlement funds had been depleted, were meaningless insofar as plaintiff was concerned. The circuit court’s order requiring proration, therefore, would not only have alleviated the harsh consequences of the rules in this particular application, but also would have only delayed, not denied altogether, the IDPA’s recovery of the settlement proceeds. Illinois circuit courts have the general authority to determine all matters in controversy arising by reason of the constitution, statute or under the common law or equity (Skilling v. Skilling (1982), 104 Ill. App. 3d 213, 219, 432 N.E.2d 881), and are endowed with wide discretion with respect to their general jurisdiction over legal and equitable matters (Biggs v. Health & Hospitals Governing Commission (1977), 55 Ill. App. 3d 501, 505-06, 370 N.E.2d 1150). The relief fashioned by the circuit court in the case sub judice was, therefore, appropriately adjusted to the facts presented before it and authorized by law and precedent. For the foregoing reasons, I would affirm the circuit court’s order in all respects.