Back in 2016, when I was the Chief Counsel for the Arizona Registrar of Contractors, I was invited to contribute to a reference book: the Arizona Construction Law Practice Manual.
(The manual is availabe from the Arizona State Bar here, if you’re interested.)
The chapter I co-authored was called simply Registrar of Contractors Proceedings.
Now, ten years later, I have been asked to revise the chapter and update it.
It is amazing to see how much has changed in ten years!
In 2016, I started the chapter by explaining that the Registrar had moved away from a “complainant driven” process to an exclusively “own motion” process, but had then moved back to what I called a “complainant handled” process. I wrote:
In 2015, the Agency realized that it needed to balance (1) its responsibility for filtering out meritless complaints and (2) the desirability of allowing complainants to remain a party to the administrative process and hearing. As a result, a case before the Agency may eventually be “complainant handled,” but it will never be “complainant driven” in the old sense.
The Agency will issue a citation only if the Agency has before it evidence justifying a citation and a subsequent hearing; the Agency will not issue a citation just because a complainant requests a hearing. Therefore, some complainants’ cases will not proceed past the investigation stage, because the Agency will not find competent grounds to issue a citation, and it will decline to issue a citation.
That decision — the decision to not issue a citation — is within the Agency’s “sole discretion,” A.R.S. § 32-1155(A), and the exercise of that discretion to prevent meritless claims from proceeding makes it possible to have a responsible system in which complainants are able to proceed to an administrative hearing and make a legitimate case.
There will be much to discuss, including the revisions in 2021 to A.R.S. § 12-910 that created the trial de novo.
