Lance D. Miraco, a former City of Salinas police officer, filed a workers’ compensation claim in December 2020 alleging cumulative injury through the end of 2013 to his back and right leg, along with gastritis, reflux, insomnia, and hypertensive cardiac disease. After trial, the workers’ compensation judge (WCJ) found industrial injury but ruled the heart claim time-barred under Labor Code § 5405, fixing the cardiac date of injury under § 5412 in June 2013.
Miraco filed a timely petition for reconsideration at the Salinas district office on October 16, 2023. Under the version of Labor Code § 5909 then in effect, a petition was deemed denied unless the Workers’ Compensation Appeals Board (WCAB) acted within 60 days of filing — here, by December 15, 2023. The petition was scanned into the EAMS system, but the district office did not transmit the case to the Board until January 12, 2024, apparently after Miraco’s counsel’s office called to check on it. According to Miraco, Board staff said a new decision timeline would run once the file arrived. On March 12, 2024, the Board invoked Shipley v. Workers’ Comp. Appeals Bd. (1992) 7 Cal.App.4th 1104, treated its deadline as tolled until it received the file, granted reconsideration, and found the cardiac claim was not time-barred.
The City and its claims administrator, CorVel, petitioned for a writ of review. In a published opinion filed August 20, 2025, City of Salinas v. Workers’ Comp. Appeals Bd. (2025) 113 Cal.App.5th 801, No. H052062, the Sixth Appellate District affirmed the Board. The panel agreed with Zurich American Ins. Co. v. Workers’ Comp. Appeals Bd. (2023) 97 Cal.App.5th 1213 and the First District’s opinion in Mayor v. Workers’ Comp. Appeals Bd. (2024) 104 Cal.App.5th 1297 that the 60-day deadline is mandatory and that late action exceeds the Board’s jurisdiction. But it went further, holding that the deadline does not touch the Board’s fundamental jurisdiction, so equitable tolling remained available in a narrow class of cases. Applying the three-part test of Saint Francis Memorial Hospital v. State Dept. of Public Health (2020) 9 Cal.5th 710 — timely notice, lack of prejudice, and reasonable, good-faith conduct — the court found tolling justified because Miraco acted diligently and was misled by an administrative delay he did not cause. The court also declined the Board’s request to wait for the Supreme Court’s pending decision in Mayor.
The California Supreme Court granted the City’s petition for review on November 19, 2025, and deferred briefing pending its decision in Mayor (S287261), the lead case on the same question.
In a minute order in the case of City of Salinas v. Workers’ Compensation Appeals Board (Miraco), No. S293212 (October 2026), the California Supreme Court transferred the matter back to the Sixth Appellate District with directions to vacate its 2025 decision and reconsider the cause in light of Mayor v. Workers’ Comp. Appeals Bd. and Ross Valley Sanitation Dist. (2026) 20 Cal.5th 874. The order, a minute order issued Wednesday, October 21, 2026, under California Rules of Court, rule 8.528(d), states that under the court’s Administrative Order 2021-04-21 and the comment to rule 8.1115(e)(3), the Court of Appeal’s published opinion is now “depublished” or “not citable.”
The Sixth District’s opinion can no longer be cited as authority, and the Court of Appeal must decide the City’s challenge anew. The Supreme Court did not rule on the merits of Miraco’s cardiac claim.
A grant-and-transfer order carries no written reasoning of its own; the controlling analysis is in Mayor, decided unanimously on August 24, 2026, in an opinion by Justice Evans. There, the Board had granted an employer’s reconsideration petition 144 days after filing, again citing an administrative irregularity and Shipley.
Mayor actually agreed with Salinas on one point: the § 5909 deadline does not implicate the Board’s fundamental jurisdiction. But the high court rejected the step that decided Salinas. Equitable tolling, the court explained, excuses litigants from filing deadlines such as statutes of limitations. The Board is neither a party nor a litigant, and § 5909 is not a statute of limitations but a deadline for the adjudicator itself to act. The court said it knew of no precedent applying tolling to a decisional deadline imposed on an adjudicative body, and found that self-tolling conflicts with the statute’s evident purpose of keeping reconsideration petitions from languishing. It also held that a writ of mandate in the Court of Appeal is a proper way for an affected party to enforce § 5909.
The court recast Shipley as a due-process decision rather than a tolling decision, and disapproved it to the extent it suggests every party has a due-process right to Board review after the deadline passes. Mayor expressly named City of Salinas as an example of the Board routinely invoking Shipley to work around its own systemic file-transfer failures. The court left open that narrow due-process circumstances might still permit late action, but said it is the adversely affected petitioner — not the Board — who must assert that claim, and that mere expiration of the deadline is not enough.
On remand, the Sixth District therefore cannot rest on equitable tolling. Absent a due-process showing of the kind Mayor left open — and Miraco’s account of assurances from Board staff may prompt that argument — his petition would appear to have been denied by operation of law in December 2023, leaving the WCJ’s time-bar finding intact. How the Court of Appeal resolves that question remains to be seen.