CASE PROCESSING PROCEDURES; EVIDENCE – Administrative and Judicial Notice

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In ruling on requests to take “administrative” or “official” notice, PERB follows the California Evidence Code provisions regarding judicial notice. (Santa Clara County Superior Court (2014) PERB Decision No. 2394-C, p. 16.) After the close of evidence, the Board granted the County’s request to take administrative notice of a County Board of Supervisors resolution imposing its last, best, and final offer (LBFO) as an official act of a subdivision of the state. However, taking such notice provided evidence only that the County imposed its LBFO in June 2019. Administrative notice does not necessarily extend to all the hearsay facts, legal conclusions, and mixed conclusions of fact and law recited in the resolution, such as its recitations that the parties’ reopener negotiations had ended in impasse after factfinding. (Glaski v. Bank of America (2013) 218 Cal.App.4th 1079, 1090 [“Courts can take judicial notice of the existence, content and authenticity of public records and other specified documents, but do not take judicial notice of the truth of the factual matters asserted in those documents.”]) That principle was particularly paramount where the Union disputed that the parties had reached a bona fide impasse. If the County wished to establish that the parties reached a bona fide, good faith impasse, it needed either to ask the ALJ to hold open the record, or to ask the ALJ or the Board to reopen the record, so that it could introduce competent factual evidence.