Redefining "quasi-judicial": the diminishing role of quasi-judicial determinations in local government personnel actions.

• Author: Epperson, Bruce
• Position: Florida

On May 26, 2004, Florida's Third District Court of Appeal granted a writ of prohibition barring the Dade County Circuit Court from exercising jurisdiction over a public employee's appeal of her disciplinary action. (1) The employee, corrections officer Sheri Moreland, was suspended and demoted by Miami-Dade County in 1997 after it was discovered she was involved in a personal relationship with a former jail inmate. (2) She appealed pursuant to the county's civil service process, and after an evidentiary hearing, the hearing officer recommended a two-year suspension without pay. The county manager accepted the hearing officer's findings, but rejected the disciplinary recommendation, instead demoting Ms. Moreland and extending her suspension for another 14 months.

The Dade County Code (3) and the Florida Rules of Appellate Procedure (4) require an employee to appeal the manager's decision to the appellate division of the Miami-Dade County Circuit Court. Ms. Moreland did not, instead filing a civil complaint in the circuit court's general jurisdiction division. The case was remanded to federal court, where her Title VII and 42 U.S.C. [section] 1983 claims were turned away on summary judgment. (5) Her remaining state law claims were returned to Miami-Dade Circuit Court, which granted partial summary judgment in favor of the county. (6) Miami-Dade County then sought and received the writ of prohibition from the Third DCA. The appeals court determined that the employee voluntarily submitted herself to, and fully utilized, the administrative review process provided by the county. It explained, "where a civil service employee pursues civil service administrative remedies, the employee is precluded from bringing an independent action in [c]ircuit [c]ourt to challenge the propriety of the discharge." (7) In this regard, the court was breaking no new ground, and the preceding quotation was followed by several citations. However, the court then advanced what looked much like a new test:

Once the employee submits himself to the administrative review procedures provided by the [o]rdinance, the employee has been afforded a quasi-judicial hearing and is not entitled to a de novo hearing in [c]ircuit [c]ourt on the claim. Instead, the employee must institute an appellate proceeding in the [c]ircuit [c]ourt [a]ppellate [d]ivision to review the adverse decision.

This test has but a single prong: Is the administrative procedure governing a civil service employee's disciplinary review enshrined within his or her employer's code of ordinances? If it is, then the employee, under Florida's long history of empowering quasi-judicial tribunals, has had his or her day in court and the employee's entry into the state's formal court system is equivalent to the appeal of an adverse trial judgment. But is this one-prong test legally tenable? This article will assert the Moreland court, borrowing from a short and irregular line of precedent, has taken a test suitable only when applied to Florida state agencies and a limited number of local government entities subject to the Florida Administrative Procedure Act (APA), (8) and inappropriately applied it to government entities, such as municipalities and counties, that are not covered by the APA.

Until 1977, all administrative functions of government, whether at the state, county, or municipal level were divided into two general classes --legislative/executive and quasi-judicial. Unlike the earlier practice in New York, where the courts recognized the acts of public officials requiring discretionary powers and judgment as judicial and, thus, beyond review, the Florida Supreme Court declared itself committed to a contrary doctrine. (9) If a county executive or board was not exercising primary and independent discretion, but was merely acting within designated limits and only seeking to determine some fact upon which the law by its own term operates, that executive or board was acting administratively, and not in a legislative, executive, or judicial capacity. (10) Was this function, asked the court, judicial or even quasi-judicial? The answer, at least in 1922, was no. The fact that the joint action of the mayor and either the city council or the city commission is necessary, explained the court, does not make the action of those bodies quasi-judicial. (11)

This doctrine held fast for 35 years, until 1957 and the seminal administrative law case De Groot v. Sheffield, 95 So. 2d 912 (Fla. 1957). Observing that no branch of administrative law is more seriously in need of reform than the law concerning methods of judicial review, the Supreme Court considered the case of Peter De Groot, a Hillsborough County School Board employee left unemployed when his position was eliminated in a reorganization. Although it cited the 1922 Owen case as its primary source, it was applying palimpsest, not precedent, when it held that a disciplinary action is quasi-judicial if the removal is contingent upon approval by an official or a board after notice and hearing, and the decision of that official or board is itself contingent on the showing made at the hearing. Moreover, in a such a trial-like forum, the evidence relied upon to sustain the ultimate finding should be sufficiently relevant and material that a reasonable mind would accept it as adequate to support the conclusion reached--a principle the court labeled "competent substantial evidence." Because this type of...