Maine Labor Relations Board

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Searching by Party Name or Date

Party Name

If you are interested in finding cases involving a particular party, use the following search format :

#doctitle *partyname*

Just insert the party name you want between the two asterisks.

Like all searches, this is case insensitive.

#docTItle *waterVILle*     returns the same results as

#DocTitle *Waterville*

Using #DocTitle restricts the search for the given term to the contents of the file's title, which is the somewhat shortened version of the case name. The title of any html document is visible in the very top band on your browser. It is also the highlighted case name seen in the results of any query from the MLRB search page. The *'s surrounding the party name are wildcards and are necessary because no title is just one word. A downside to this is that if, for example, you are looking for Kennebunk cases, you would also get Kennebunkport cases (if there were any). A search by party name will not necessarily bring up the court decisions for cases appealed, but those appeals are accessible through the board decision itself.

The titles of the case files include the common abbreviations used for the unions involved. In an effort to make the process for searching by party as useful as possible, no periods were used in these abbreviations and MEA was used even for those older cases when the Maine Education Association was known as the MTA.

The abbreviations used are MSEA, MEA, AFSCME, AFT, IBEW, IAFF, UPIU, IAMAW, AFUM, COLT, and UMPSA.

MSAD 99 is the format for school administrative districts. Note No # or No. is used in the title.

To search for an MSAD as a party, the most effective way is to include it (and the two *'s) in quotes like this:

#doctitle "*MSAD 43*"

Searching for compound names is the same. You must do exactly this:

#doctitle "*Mountain Valley*"     OR #doctitle "*South Portland*"    

If you are not sure if it is Portland Water District or Water District of Portland (for example), you can do this:

#doctitle *Portland* and *Water*

Single Digit MSADs present a bit of a complication as well.

#doctitle "*MSAD 1*"     will return MSAD 1 cases as well as MSAD 16, 14 etc. The best solution I can come up with is this:

#doctitle "*MSAD 1 *" and "*MSAD 1,*"     to cover your bases.

If you want to combine a search for a particular party (which searches the title) with a regular search term (which looks at the body of the document), you need to use parentheses.

(#doctitle *Waterville*) AND unilateral         returns all cases with Waterville in the Title and the word unilateral in the body.

Searching by Filing Date

Searching by filing year is as close as we can come to searching by date of the decision. All cases filed at the MLRB are assigned a case number when they are filed. The first two digits of that case number indicate the fiscal year during which the case was filed. For example, cases filed between July 1, 2001 and June 30, 2002 were assigned a case number beginning with 02. PPC cases from that year have the format 02-XX while unit determination and unit clarification cases have the format 02-UD-XX or 02-UC-XX, respectively. As we use the case number as the filename for our website, we can use the #filename property query to find cases from a given year.

The format for retrieving decisions by year of filing is :

#filename 02*   will return all decisions with case numbers beginning with 02.(Note: Your radio button selection of PPC cases only, Unit cases, or all cases will dictate the total number of cases returned)

#filename 97* OR 98*     returns all 97 and 98 cases.

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Here are some other examples of more complex queries:

#filename 9* and #doctitle *MEA*     results in cases in which MEA is a party and the case was filed in the 1990's.

(#filename 98* OR 97* OR 96*) and (#doctitle *Minot* or "*Mountain Valley*") will return decisions for cases filed in 1996-1998 with either Minot or Mountain Valley in the title.

(#filename 9* and #doctitle *MEA*) and unilateral         returns decisions for cases filed in the '90's involving MEA with the word unilateral in the decision.

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