Appeal

The one-sentence answer

An appeal is how you formally disagree with a regional center decision — a denied service, a denied spending plan item, a budget you believe is wrong — and Self-Determination participants use exactly the same appeal process as everyone else.

What this means for you

There is no separate Self-Determination appeal track. Budget denials, spending plan denials and service denials all go through the standard Lanterman Act process. DDS is explicit: participants "have the same rights as other regional center consumers. These include appeals, fair hearing, and all other rights associated with the individual program plan process."

Two deadlines matter more than anything else on this page:

To file an appeal after a Notice of Action	60 days
To keep your services running during the appeal	30 days

That second one is the trap. It is called aid paid pending — your services continue unchanged while the appeal is decided — but you have to file within 30 days of receiving the Notice of Action and before the proposed change takes effect, not within 60. DDS puts it plainly: appeals filed after the 30-day line "are not eligible for aid paid pending." Miss it and you may still appeal, but you could go without the service for the months the process takes. If you are appealing anything you currently receive, act on the 30-day clock, not the 60-day one.

Check your own dates against the DDS flow chart. It is one page, it is the source these figures come from, and it is the thing to trust over any summary including this one: Appeals Process Timelines (PDF). The fuller Lanterman Act Appeals Information Packet sits behind it and is published in seventeen languages.

How to file — DDS gives three routes:

• Online, via "Request an Appeal Online"
• By form DS 1821, available in multiple languages
• By email to appealrequest@dds.ca.gov

Appeals go directly to DDS, not to your regional center. That changed on 1 March 2023 and it is worth knowing, because it means the body deciding is not the body you are disagreeing with.

You do not have to do this alone. An independent facilitator can help, and Disability Rights California provides free assistance to regional center consumers.

For the detail-oriented

Statutory basis: WIC Chapter 7, commencing with section 4700 — particularly 4710, 4710.5 and 4712. WIC 4685.8 preserves these rights for Self-Determination participants.

The stages, after filing:

All of these run from the date of the appeal request, not from each other, and "days" means calendar days unless the row says otherwise.

Stage	Deadline
DDS notifies the regional center of your appeal	within 1 business day
Regional center informal meeting	within 10 days
Mediation held	within 30 days
Fair hearing held	within 50 days
Final decision from the Office of Administrative Hearings	within 10 business days of the hearing, and no more than 80 days from the appeal request
If it is instead a proposed decision, the DDS Director reviews it	within 90 days of the appeal request
Regional center implements the decision	within 30 days of the final decision
Request reconsideration	within 15 days of the final decision
Appeal to superior court	within 180 days

You can request any of the three parts. Informal meeting, mediation and hearing are separate steps, and you are not obliged to take all of them.

Two things the table cannot show. The regional center's 30 days to implement can be extended if reconsideration was requested, or for exceptional circumstances. And some decisions are proposed rather than final, which routes them to the DDS Director and the 90-day line above instead.

Related forms: DS 1819 (authorizing a representative), DS 1820 (Notice of Action). If a decision in your favor is not implemented: HearingImplementation@dds.ca.gov.

Where these figures come from. Every deadline on this page was checked line by line against the DDS Appeals Process Timelines flow chart, effective 1 March 2023, which is linked above. That check corrected one figure: the decision deadline after a hearing is 10 business days, not 10 calendar days as this entry previously said.

Deadlines change, and yours is the one that governs. Read the date on your own Notice of Action and count from that. If anything here disagrees with the DDS flow chart, the flow chart is right and we want to know — tell us.