Chalmers v. Burrough
| Decision Date | 27 August 2021 |
| Docket Number | No. 121,108,121,108 |
| Citation | 494 P.3d 128 |
| Court | Kansas Supreme Court |
| Parties | Almario V. CHALMERS, Appellant, v. Brittany BURROUGH, Appellee. |
Jeffrey N. Lowe, of Penner Lowe Law Group L.L.C., of Wichita, argued the cause, and Jessica F. Leavitt, of Stinson, Lasswell & Wilson, LC, of Wichita, was with him on the brief for appellant.
Cheryl J. Roberts, of Wichita, argued the cause and was on the brief for appellee.
Almario V. Chalmers attempted to register a child support order from Florida in a Kansas district court and moved to modify the amount of the order. Initially, no one realized Chalmers mistakenly left the order out of his registration materials. The district court imposed a temporary modification order. When it came to light that Chalmers had failed to include the Florida order with his registration materials, the district court concluded it never had jurisdiction to modify the order, so it voided the registration and modification and dismissed the case. The Court of Appeals affirmed.
In 2015, Chalmers was playing professionally for the Miami Heat of the National Basketball Association (NBA) and living in Florida. His daughter and daughter's mother, Brittany Burrough, were living in Kansas. In March of 2015, a Florida district court entered an order requiring Chalmers to pay Burrough $10,000 per month in child support for the care of their daughter.
In October 2018, Chalmers was allegedly no longer living in Florida, and Burrough and her daughter were still living in Kansas. Chalmers' NBA career was coming to a close, and he wanted to modify his monthly child support obligation according to his new level of income. Because Chalmers claimed to no longer be living in Florida, he did not move to modify the order in that state. Instead, on October 2, 2018, he filed a petition seeking to register the order in a Kansas district court pursuant to the Uniform Interstate Family Support Act (UIFSA). See K.S.A. 2020 Supp. 23-36,601 et seq. The petition indicated that it included the statutorily required copies of the out-of-state child support order. This was incorrect—no copies of the order were attached.
With the petition to register, Chalmers attached a motion to modify the child support. It claimed he was no longer employed and requested his monthly child support be modified pursuant to the Kansas Child Support Guidelines. Accompanying the motion was a worksheet that indicated his monthly child support obligation should be reduced to $126 per month. Also with the petition was a notice that advised Burrough she had 20 days from receipt of service to challenge the registration of the order. Upon receipt of the petition, the district court set a hearing on the motion to modify for October 30, 2018. This hearing was later continued to November 13, 2018.
Burrough was personally served with the petition and attachments on October 16, 2018. Burrough did not respond or challenge the petition to register. On November 6, 2018, the district court accepted registration of the Florida order and ruled it had "jurisdiction of this matter and of the parties hereto."
On November 13, 2020, the district court temporarily modified Chalmers' child support obligation. The modification order reduced the support to $1,000 per month beginning November 1, 2018, "by agreement of the parties to preserve the peace." It appears no hearing took place before the court imposed this order. Apparently, in place of a hearing, counsel for Chalmers and an attorney appearing on behalf of Burrough's attorney of record—to whom Burrough claimed she had never spoken—agreed that Chalmers' support would be temporarily reduced to $1,000.
On January 14, 2019, Chalmers filed a Motion for Order Allowing Addition to Record. In the motion, he informed the court that he had mistakenly omitted the Florida child support order from the petition to register. He requested the court allow him to amend the petition to include the order.
On January 8, 2019, Burrough filed a motion to set aside the temporary order. She asserted she had not agreed to the temporary modification.
On January 15, 2019, Burrough also filed "a motion to dismiss the case and void [the] judgment due to lack of jurisdiction and lack of subject matter jurisdiction." In this motion, she argued that Chalmers' failure to attach the Florida child support order to his original petition violated statutory requirements, and meant the district court never obtained jurisdiction to enforce or modify the support order. She also alleged that Chalmers was still a Florida resident.
Chalmers responded, arguing that Burrough could not challenge the registration of the order because she failed to do so within 20 days from receiving the original petition. In the alternative, he argued that the Kansas district court obtained subject matter jurisdiction to register the Florida order because he had substantially complied with the registration requirements in the UIFSA.
On February 22, 2019, the district court ruled the failure to attach copies of the Florida order to the original petition was a critical failure that deprived it of jurisdiction. It "set aside" the registration and modification of child support. The court informed Chalmers he would need to refile his petition and serve Burrough with the new petition. On April 2, 2019, the court dismissed the case.
Chalmers appealed. A divided Court of Appeals panel affirmed the district court's decision to set aside the registration and modification. Chalmers v. Burrough , 58 Kan. App. 2d 531, 533, 472 P.3d 586 (2020). We granted Chalmers' petition for review.
When one or more parties subject to a child support order leaves the state that issued the order, the parties may ask another state's court to enforce or modify the order. All 50 states, including Kansas, have adopted model legislation—the UIFSA—that assists with this interstate enforcement. Hatamyar, Interstate Establishment, Enforcement, and Modification of Child Support Orders , 25 Okla. City U. L. Rev. 511, 512, 514 (2000).
Under the UIFSA, the first procedural step in an action for enforcement or modification of an out-of-state support order is, generally, registration. K.S.A. 2020 Supp. 23-36,601 (); Unif. Interstate Family Support Act § 601, cmt. (2008) ("Registration of an order in a tribunal of the responding state is the first step to enforce a support order from another state or foreign country."); K.S.A. 2020 Supp. 23-36,609 ().
K.S.A. 2020 Supp. 23-36,602 provides the UIFSA requirements for properly registering an order in Kansas:
Upon registration of the order, the non-registering party must be served with notice. The notice must include a copy of the support order. K.S.A. 2020 Supp. 23-36,605(a). If the non-registering party fails to contest the out-of-state order within 20 days, this results in the "confirmation of the order and enforcement of the order and the alleged arrearages." K.S.A. 2020 Supp. 23-36,605(b)(3).
The UIFSA authorizes a court to enforce any registered order. But it permits modification of that order only under certain circumstances. The court that issued the support order "has and shall exercise continuing, exclusive jurisdiction to modify its child-support order" as long as (1) one of the parties or child lives in the state; or (2) the parties consent that the state may "continue to exercise jurisdiction to modify its order." Unif. Interstate Family Support Act § 205 ; K.S.A. 2020 Supp. 23-36,205. This rule is central to the UIFSA's goal of ensuring there is only one child support order in place at a time. § 205, cmt. ("Indeed [continuing exclusive jurisdiction] is fundamental to the principle of one-child-support-order-at-a-time.").
K.S.A. 2020 Supp. 23-36,611 describes the circumstances under which the issuing court's continuing exclusive jurisdiction is disrupted and a Kansas court may modify an out-of-state order:
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State v. Hand
...jurisdiction. We should not impute such a sweeping bar into the much narrower language of K.S.A. 22-4908. See Chalmers v. Burrough , 314 Kan. 1, 11, 494 P.3d 128 (2021) (statute typically does not deprive district court of general or subject matter jurisdiction absent "explicit" restrictive......
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State v. Hand
...We should not impute such a sweeping bar into the much narrower language of K.S.A. 22-4908. See Chalmers v. Burrough, 314 Kan. 1, 11, 494 P.3d 128 (2021) (statute typically does not deprive district court of general or subject matter jurisdiction absent "explicit" restrictive language). The......
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State v. Hand
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