Court Opinion

ID: 9795898
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 03:41:40.072379+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T08:40:33.078022
License: Public Domain

BRYNER, Justice,
with whom FABE, Chief Justice, joins, dissenting.
I disagree with the opinion’s due process analysis. In my view the opinion misapplies Mathews v. Eldridge’s balancing test1 by treating it as if it were a rational basis analysis. Without any meaningful attempt at balancing the competing private and governmental interests, and despite conceding the importance of Palmer’s retirement benefits, the opinion summarily concludes that his right to a rational and non-arbitrary ruling on his entitlement to these benefits must yield to the city’s conjectural interests in the PFRB’s five-minimum-vote requirement — illusory interests that the city itself has not even bothered to argue and that are incapable of withstanding even rational basis scrutiny.
The opinion identifies two supposedly legitimate governmental interests that a “full-body” voting requirement might further: (1) to “help ensure a broad consensus is reached for important governmental action;” 2 and (2) to encourage “a spirit of cooperation and compromise” among participating PFRB members.3 Upon examination, however, neither interest proves legitimate when a full-body voting requirement applies to a panel like the PFRB.
A full-body voting provision can be eminently sensible when applied to political or administrative bodies charged with making, planning, or implementing public policy on a community-wide basis for the good of the public as a whole. As the opinion correctly observes, when used by public bodies that make policy-level decisions of this kind — bodies like legislatures or assemblies, zoning boards, and various planning or regulatory commissions — a voting provision requiring broad-based consensus can serve a legitimate governmental interest by ensuring that the body’s actions do what they are supposed to do: promote the general public interest by reflecting community-wide perceptions of sound policy.
Yet no comparable governmental interest is readily apparent when a public board performs judicial, rather than political, junctions: when its actions are guided not by broad notions of public policy meant to advance community interests as a whole, but the traditional principles of case-specific adjudication. When a panel’s core duties require it to resolve individual disputes concerning actionable rights and duties through a formal process that entails an evidentiary hearing, factfinding, and a binding decision based on applicable law, the government has no legitimate interest in seeking broad-based political consensus.4
Reflecting this disparity of interests, every example of full-body voting discussed in the court’s opinion involves a public body engaged in political decision-making rather than case-specific adjudication. The court cites no authority supporting the proposition that full-body voting has any legitimate place in administrative adjudication of legal claims.5
*850Here, the PFRB’s decision indisputably involved an adjudicative process, not a political process. Palmer is not asking for discretionary public benefits. He is asserting a straightforward contract claim. As the court’s opinion acknowledges, Palmer had a significant financial stake in receiving the benefits guaranteed by his retirement plan. His interest in those benefits arose under the terms of his municipal employment contract; it accrued over his many years of service as a city police officer; and, by the time he applied for retirement, it had ripened into a fully vested and enforceable property right. In asserting administrative jurisdiction over Palmer’s legal claim of right, the PFRB was obliged to resolve the claim by finding the facts of Palmer’s case through a fair and impartial evidentiary hearing and by determining the legal significance of those facts under his retirement plan and applicable law. The board’s duties were thus case-specific and guided by legal principles that leave no legitimate room for individual board members to assert partisan interests or make general policy decisions for the broader public good.
Given the narrow adjudicative role played by the PFRB, the city’s ostensible interest in using full-body voting to ensure broad-based consensus rings false: in this distinctly nonpolitical context, counting two absent board members as voting against a claim is functionally indistinguishable from — and no more defensible than — excusing two jurors from attendance at trial and counting their absences as votes for the defendant. The analogy between the PFRB and a jury is of course somewhat inexact'but is nonetheless apt. Its accuracy can be confirmed by comparing the PFRB’s voting rule to those used by other quasi-judicial tribunals in Alaska whose composition and duties are similar to the PFRB’s. For example, Alaska’s Teachers’ Retirement Board, Public Employees’ Retirement Board, and Workers’ Compensation Board all have memberships with a specified makeup; all sit as multi-member tribunals, engage in repeated adjudication, and develop collective expertise; and all have individual members who bring different expertise and professional perspectives to the adjudicative process.6 Yet ttíeir voting rules reflect no legitimate need for full-body voting: each of these boards decides each case it considers by majority vote based upon those members present and voting.7
The second purportedly legitimate government interest in full-body voting — encouraging a “spirit of cooperation and compromise” on the PFRB — is simply a variation on the first and fares no better. A “spirit of cooperation and compromise” may be a laudable and important goal when dealing with a governmental body like a coastal regulatory commission, which addresses broad issues of policy and renders decisions based on its individual members’ subjective perceptions of public interests. But pressing for compromise becomes far more questionable when the pressure is applied to an adjudicative body whose primary obligation is similar to a jury’s — to decide individual cases fairly and impartially by hearing evidence, finding facts, and applying settled legal rules to their findings. A policy encouraging PFRB members to “cooperate and compromise” their individually held views seems no more acceptable, and no worthier of judicial deference, than would be a comparable policy encouraging juries to compromise in judicial proceedings.
As applied in this case, then, the five-minimum-vote requirement is fundamentally arbitrary and serves no legitimate purpose. Moreover, as the court admits, the rule could be easily be cured; in fact it has already been discarded by the city. Given the countervailing importance of Palmer’s right to *851retirement benefits,8 I would hold that Mathews v. Eldridge’s balancing test compels the conclusion that the PFRB’s voting rule violated Palmer’s right to due process.
I therefore dissent from the court’s opinion affirming the superior court’s judgment.

. 424 U.S. 319, 334-35, 96 S.Ct. 893, 47 L.Ed.2d 18 (1976).

. Op. at 840-841.

. Op. at 839-840.

. Suppose for example that a city official acting with appropriate authority entered into a contract for services with a party who performed the services and then submitted a claim for payment to the appropriate municipal board after the city refused to pay. The city’s only legitimate interest in this situation would be to ensure that the board fairly resolved the dispute by a case-specific application of governing law; it could hardly claim a legitimate interest in a voting process that allowed the board to renege on the city's promise unless it garnered board-wide support reflecting diverse perceptions of public policy.

.The court faults this dissent for failing to cite any cases holding that a full-body voting rule is unconstitutional when used by a quasi-judicial administrative tribunal. But the abundance of cases addressing the practice when it is used in the context of political decision-making and the absence of comparable cases involving quasi-judicial administrative tribunals provide telling evidence that, for quasi-judicial tribunals, the *850practice itself is rare, if not unprecedented. And as pointed out in the text of this dissent, a comparison of the PFRB’s voting rule with those of similar quasi-judicial boards in Alaska yields further evidence that the PFRB’s voting rule is unique in this context.

. See AS 14.25.035(a)(1) & (2) (teachers’ retirement board); AS 39.35.030 (public employees’ retirement board); AS 23.30.005(a) (workers' compensation board).

. See 2 AAC 36.130(b) (teachers' retirement board); 2 AAC 35.170(b) (public employees’ retirement board); AS 23.30.005(f) (workers' compensation board).

. The court's willingness to condone this requirement is especially perplexing in light of the court’s recognition that the requirement deprived Palmer of an important property right. Given this recognition, today's holding adds an odd twist to our recent decision in Whitesides v. State, 20 P.3d 1130 (Alaska 2001). There, applying Mathews v. Eldridge, we held that if credibility plays a role in deciding the issue — as the court acknowledges it did here — Alaska's due process clause prohibits administrative tribunals from depriving litigants of important property interests without affording them the right to an in-person hearing. Id. at 1135-37. In light of today’s opinion, our case law now paradoxically holds that due process guarantees a litigant in Palmer's shoes the right to an in-person administrative hearing but grants no right to insist that members of the administrative tribunal participate in the hearing before voting.