Fortin v. Commissioner of Massachusetts Dept. of Public Welfare

• Decision Date: 04 November 1982
• Docket Number: No. 82-1138,82-1138
• Citation: 692 F.2d 790
• Parties: Jane FORTIN, et al., etc., Plaintiffs, Appellees, v. COMMISSIONER OF the MASSACHUSETTS DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC WELFARE, Defendant, Appellant.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — First Circuit

Page 790

692 F.2d 790

Jane FORTIN, et al., etc., Plaintiffs, Appellees, v. COMMISSIONER OF the MASSACHUSETTS DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC

WELFARE, Defendant, Appellant.

No. 82-1138.

United States Court of Appeals, First Circuit.

Argued Sept. 10, 1982.

Decided Nov. 4, 1982.

H. Reed Witherby, Asst. Atty. Gen., Boston, Mass., with whom Francis X. Bellotti, Atty. Gen., and Paul W. Johnson, Asst. Atty. Gen., Boston, Mass., were on brief, for appellant.

Jim Hammerschmith, Northampton, Mass., for appellees.

Before SWYGERT, ^* Senior Circuit Judge and BOWNES and BREYER, Circuit Judges.

SWYGERT, Senior Circuit Judge.

This case is an appeal from an order of the district court finding the Massachusetts Department of Public Welfare ("Department") not in substantial compliance with a 1975 consent decree enjoining delays in welfare eligibility determinations, holding the Department in civil contempt, and imposing fines for further noncompliance. The Department also appeals the district court's denial of its motion to amend the decree. Because the finding of substantial noncompliance is not clearly erroneous, and the penalty does not violate the eleventh amendment to the Constitution, we affirm the contempt order. We also affirm the denial of the motion to amend, because it was not an abuse of the district court's discretion.

I

In 1974 the plaintiffs filed this class action alleging that the Department failed to comply with federal and state law and regulations in administering the cooperative Aid to Families with Dependent Children ("AFDC") program and the state-run General Relief ("GR") program. Each program prescribes a time limit following application in which eligibility determinations must be made. In early 1975 the Department met the thirty-day AFDC limit ¹ in 66.8% of the cases, and the two-week GR limit ² in 52.5% of the cases. On March 3, 1975, the district court approved the consent decree, in which the Department agreed to process AFDC applications and mail checks to those eligible within thirty days, to determine GR eligibility within fourteen days of application, and to mail GR checks within eight days of the eligibility determinations.

In September 1978 the plaintiffs filed a motion to hold the Department in civil contempt for failure to comply with the decree. At that time, according to the Department's own statistics, the average rate of timeliness in the Commonwealth's six regions was 79% for AFDC and 87% for GR. After extensive hearings, during which the court found substantial noncompliance, the district court held the Department in civil contempt on December 2, 1981. The Department's statistics for July 1981, the last month's available at the time of the contempt order, showed statewide average compliance of 94.4% for AFDC and 94.1% for GR, with compliance rates as low as 87.3% for AFDC and 87.5% for GR in individual regions. Both before and after July 1981 the rates fluctuated from month to month. In its contempt order the district court noted that "compliance was often below 90% and sometimes below 80% for a particular region and month, ³ that the statistics for the period in question had overstated compliance because of the Department's practices of postdating some applications and denying others that were incomplete after a certain time period even when the applicant was not at fault, and that the decree was neither ambiguous nor impossibly strict. It therefore ordered the Department to pay a $100.00 fine to each eligible applicant whose eligibility determination is delayed up to thirty days, and an additional $100.00 fine for every sixty-day period of delay thereafter.

II

The Department argues on appeal that the findings of substantial noncompliance and contempt were legally incorrect because the compliance statistics met the legal standard of substantiality, and its diligence and improvement in compliance precluded contempt. We address these two contentions in turn.

A

In this circuit district court findings based on undisputed facts or documentary evidence are reviewable only for clear error, the standard prescribed by Fed.R.Civ.P. 52(a) for all factual findings. See, e.g., Keebler Co. v. Rovira Biscuit Corp., 624 F.2d 366, 377 (1st Cir.1980); Constructora Maza, Inc. v. Banco de Ponce, 616 F.2d 573, 576 & n. 2 (1st Cir.1980); Raymond v. Eli Lilly & Co., 556 F.2d 628, 629 (1st Cir.1977). This is true even when a mixed question of law and fact is at issue, as here. See Sweeney v. Board of Trustees, 604 F.2d 106, 109 n. 2 (1st Cir.1979), cert. denied, 444 U.S. 1045, 100 S.Ct. 733, 62 L.Ed.2d 731 (1980). See also Pullman-Standard v. Swint, --- U.S. ----, 102 S.Ct. 1781, 1790 n. 19, 72 L.Ed.2d 66 (1982). This standard is met only "when although there is evidence to support [the finding], the reviewing court on the entire evidence is left with the definite and firm conviction that a mistake has been committed." United States v. Gypsum Co., 333 U.S. 364, 395, 68 S.Ct. 525, 541, 92 L.Ed. 746 (1948). The finding of substantial noncompliance has not been shown to be clearly erroneous.

The Department argues that its noncompliance rate for the last six months preceding the contempt order in which statistics were available averaged 96.3% for AFDC and 95.8% for GR, rates comparable to that found to satisfy a different timeliness regulation in Shands v. Tull, 602 F.2d 1156, 1161 (3d Cir.1979). This argument is flawed for several reasons, however. First, the district court properly looked to a larger band of statistics than the six months' the Department highlights. Although it is true that contempt is a penalty reserved for present and not past wrongs, the court's broader perspective was justified because of the history of seasonal fluctuations in the compliance levels. In fact the compliance rates dipped in the months following the six-month period ending in July 1981. ⁴ The levels of compliance during the period the court considered were poorer than the levels during those six months.

Second, the district court did not rely on the statewide averages alone in assessing substantiality of compliance, but looked to regional rates as well. Even during the six-month period to which the Department refers, regional compliance rates were as low as 87.3%, and some regional rates were worse in the periods before and after. These blemishes on the record of compliance tend to refute the Department's claim of substantiality.

Third, the district court found that the available statistics overstated compliance to a degree, because some of the Department's employees postdated applications or denied applications that could not be processed within the proper time for reasons beyond the applicants' control, in violation of 45 C.F.R. Sec. 206.10(a)(3) (1981). It is no answer that this problem has been remedied, for, as the district court noted, the assurance of remedial action came after the statistical period on which the Department relies. Those figures therefore remain suspect. Moreover, even if the Department is correct in its additional assertion that the statistics understate compliance in some other respects and that the errors tend to offset each other, the Department revealed at oral argument that the statistics considered by the district court contained a hitherto unknown error that inflated the compliance rate. ⁵ Because this error has in fact been established, the Department is not in a position to object to the district court's finding that the Department's compliance rate was overstated. Either reason for discounting the compliance rates supports the finding of substantial noncompliance.

Finally, no particular percentage of compliance can be a safe-harbor figure, transferable from one context to another. Like 'reasonableness,' see Caswell v. Califano, 583 F.2d 9, 18 (1st Cir.1978), 'substantiality' must depend on the circumstances of each case, including the nature of the interest at stake and the degree to which noncompliance affects that interest. In the present case, the interest at stake--entitlement to subsistence-level benefits--is great, see Mathews v. Eldridge, 424 U.S. 319, 340-43, 96 S.Ct. 893, 904-06, 47 L.Ed.2d 18 (1976); Goldberg v. Kelly, 397 U.S. 254, 264, 90 S.Ct. 1011, 1018, 25 L.Ed.2d 287 (1970), making the consequences of failure to comply quite serious. The district court properly weighed the seriousness of the harm, with which it was familiar through its supervision of the consent decree, in considering the substantiality of the Department's compliance. It is for this reason that the 96% compliance rate in Shands v. Tull, supra, cannot be a touchstone of substantiality. That case involved delays in hearing appeals from denials of AFDC benefits. If the reversal rate of initial determinations of ineligibility is small, as it was in Shands, delays in appeals will have markedly less impact on recipients as a class than the same rate of delay in initial eligibility determinations. This consideration therefore supports the district court's finding of substantial noncompliance. Because of this support as well as the other support discussed above, we are not left, after reviewing all the evidence, "with the definite and firm conviction that a mistake has been committed," United States v. Gypsum Co., 333 U.S. at 395, 68 S.Ct. at 541. ⁶

In addition to its argument concerning the rates of compliance within the time limits of the decree, the Department also urges that, because most applicants are subject only to limited delay beyond those limits, its compliance is substantial. Its assertion is based on statistics from a study conducted during June and July 1979 that charted the percentages of applications processed at five-day intervals after the time limits prescribed by the decree had passed. ⁷ These statistics show at most, however, that the Department substantially complied with a more generous standard than that demanded by the consent decree and the applicable laws. Indeed, the time...