2024-08-12 Merit Appeals Board Minutes

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Merit Appeals Board August 12, 2024 If you look at one of the appeal forms, you'll see it at the bottom. And this—and 104-2 goes on further to read—appeals from an administrative review of the Director under Title I of the Rules of the Department of Human Resources, shall be filed within twenty calendar days from the director's—and I'm going to emphasize that—"decision." So, the emphasis is "decision" whether it's from the Internal Complaint Procedure or an Admin. Review that was done with the Director of Human Resources. It's "decision" that's our existing Rule. Now, as I was preparing for all of this, I came across a number of things that concerned me—and that's why I wanted to discuss it with my fellow Board members—if you look at the Internal Complaint Procedures that our secretary handed out to you this morning, if you look at page 7, Roman numeral "V. Step 3 - Merit Appeals Board"—okay, these are the Internal Complaint Procedures that a civil service employee, in collective bargaining, would follow. They go through the internal complaint process—okay—as outlined in these procedures. And Roman numeral "V. Step 3C." the last paragraph there on page 7, "For the purposes of filing the appeal to the Merit Appeals Board, the date of receipt of either the Mayor's or Council Chair's decision shall be considered the date of receipt of notice of the action." Now, date of the decision is important because when an appellant files their appeal, the Merit Appeals Board is looking at whether their appeal is timely—if it's within the 20 calendar days of the decision. And I've been seeing correspondence from some of the departments where they're notifying the appellant and are we the question is, are we using the decision date or are we using the date of receipt? Because our Rules are very specific -104-2 is decision. Mr. Halvorson, you being our Deputy Attorney General for our appeal hearings, can you provide us some guidance on this because if we need to change something or notify our 23 departments in the County that they should be incorporating the decision in their letters to possible appellants that we need to be very clear on what we are telling everyone. MR. HALVORSON: Well, I agree that you need to be clear, but I think that your Rule's sufficient. We've got a recent Supreme Court decision concerning this issue of receipt of the notice. And the Supreme Court says, just the fact that you think you mailed it, it's not sufficient—you have to have other proof. So, I would just avoid that whole issue of when was the receipt actually received. There are people that have post office boxes that they don't check on. You just end up with a can of worms. So, I would go with something that's pretty clear-cut, like the date of the decision. CHR. CABANAS: The date of the decision? MR. HALVORSON: Yeah. CHR. CABANAS: So, our departments when they send letters—when they send letters to a possible appellant or an individual their letter should be dated the date of the decision—was that what you would recommend? Page 8