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August 17, 2021

Daly v. San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors (Aug. 9, 2021, S260209)

The San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors selected a new supervisor to fill a vacancy. Plaintiffs alleged that the selection process violated the Ralph M. Brown Act (Gov. Code, § 54950 et seq.) and sought a peremptory writ of mandate, requesting an order requiring the Board to rescind the appointment. The trial court issued a peremptory writ, and ordered the Board to rescind the appointment, refrain from allowing the new supervisor to participate in meetings or cast votes, refrain from making another appointment to the position, and seat another new supervisor selected by the Governor.

The Board appealed. After obtaining a temporary stay of the judgment from the superior court, the Board petitioned the Court of Appeal for a writ of supersedes and requested an immediate stay. The Court of Appeal issued a temporary stay pending briefing on the supersedeas petition, but then denied the stay for the pendency of the appeal. The Court of Appeal concluded that the trial court’s order was not automatically stayed as a mandatory injunction because the trial court’s writ of mandate and injunction were prohibitory in nature. The Court of Appeal also denied the writ of supersedeas.

The Supreme Court granted review and held that the trial court’s order was primarily a mandatory injunction that should have been automatically stayed. After thoroughly examining the history of case law staying enforcement of mandatory as opposed to prohibitory injunctions, the Court concluded that the trial court’s requirement to remove the supervisor and seat the Governor’s replacement was a mandatory order and could not plausibly be described as merely incidental to other, prohibitory aspects of the order. Because the prohibitory elements in the order were incidental to the mandatory elements, the order should have been characterized as a mandatory injunction and automatically stayed.

In reaching its conclusion, the Court noted that ”the mandatory-prohibitory distinction can prove challenging to apply,” and suggested the Legislature might want to “reexamine California’s statutory law governing stays pending appeal and decide whether the law would be better served by an approach that permits courts to take account of a wider array of equitable considerations than does present law.”