nothin WPCA’s Targets Struggle To Dig Out | New Haven Independent

WPCA’s Targets Struggle To Dig Out

Jackson%20another.JPGWillie Jackson doesn’t remember missing any sewer bills. Then again, he didn’t know that the sewer authority had just sued to take away his Munson Street home, either.

After three strokes, Jackson (pictured), 74, forgets a lot.

I haven’t heard anything about that,” he said while watching TV in his living room the other day.

His wife Elaine pays the bills — when she can. And she’s fully aware that the Water Pollution Control Authority (WPCA) filed suit this month to foreclose on the home the couple has owned since 1982 in the shadow of the former gun plant where William made rifles for 43 years.

The Jacksons are among the homeowners in New Haven swept up in the latest wave of foreclosure suits filed by the WPCA. The agency has now filed such suits against more than 135 city homeowners since the middle of 2005.

The WPCA has come under criticism from legal-aid lawyers, a state judge and state representatives for its debt-collection tactics, which are harsher than those of other similar agencies. On the other hand, its tactics enjoy the support of Mayor John DeStefano, as well as the New Haven Register, which editorialized in its favor on this issue last week.

The issue isn’t whether the WPCA should go after bad debt. It’s whether it should follow the lead of other agencies (such as the water authority) and look to small-claims court or, if necessary, liens, rather than aggressively file foreclosure suits that push financially troubled families closer to the point of losing their homes.

Alderman Carl Goldfield and Ina Silverman have called for a hearing to gain a better picture of just whose homes are being targeted, and why.

Some of the targets are out-of-town investors who abandon their properties, or local absentee landlords.

But others are homeowners like the Jacksons, Cisse Kay Washington, and Yvonne Hammonds — working people struggling with medical bills, subprime loans, or other woes at a time of mounting foreclosures.

Washington, for instance, started having financial problems when business slowed at the hair-braiding shop she runs on the first floor of her Dixwell Avenue home; now she’s in deeper trouble because the WPCA sued to foreclose on her $260,000 home over $793.10 in back bills. Her attorney, Stephen Wizner of the Yale Law School’s legal clinic, said she sent in $200 to start paying down what was originally a $993 debt, but that wasn’t enough to stop the WPCA from filing suit. (The WPCAs lawyer in the case, Louis Crisci, could not be reached for comment.)

Pipes Bursts

Yvonne Hammonds could be a poster person for the current subprime/ foreclosure crisis, except that she didn’t want her picture taken.

She did relate the events that led to her battling the WPCA to keep her home.

An outreach worker for the Yale Child Study Center, Hammonds bought a house eight years ago on Shelton Avenue in the Newhallville neighborhood. She lives on the second floor, her mom on the first.

Soon after she bought it she encountered one plumbing disaster after another.” She discovered corroded pipes; leaks were damaging the walls.

She needed emergency repairs, and the expenses started piling up. She fell behind on her bills, including her water and sewer bills. She struggled to stay current. She claims at one time she paid a $646 past-due bill to the WPCA after it placed a lien on her home.

Trying to refinance, she discovered most lenders wouldn’t help her because her credit was shot. A subprime lender did. Hammonds said she was confused about the terms, and knew the interest rate was high — but then she discovered at the closing that it was even higher than she thought, 12.99 percent. She thought she’d be paying $2,014 a month; the number was $2,400 instead. I was in a bind,” she said. I signed it anyway.”

She fell behind again on bills, including her WPCA bills. Still, she was shocked,” she said, when a sherrif earlier this month served her with papers of a foreclosure suit from the WPCA. (She doesn’t question that she owes the authority money. She does claim that the $1,789.04 listed as past due included $646 she had previously paid to get rid of the old lien.)

Hammonds was further confused by the mortgage-holder listed in the court papers: Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems Inc. of Ellington. She never heard of them. She didn’t know that her loan had been resold.

While the DeStefano administration hasn’t been interested in connecting with targets of WPCA foreclosures, Neighborhood Housing Services has offered Hammonds assistance in digging out.

NHS Executive Director James Paley argues that the WPCAs tactics could even feed a new cycle of predatory lending in marginal neighborhoods.

In the 1980s, he recalled, predatory lenders would scour the Commercial Record to find people with liens on their houses for unpaid bills, and then swoop down offering to pay off all their bills and consolidate’ all their payments. They often used scare tactics: You know, you could lose your house if Macy’s decides to foreclose on their judgment lien…’”

As a result, Paley said, creditors doing then what the WPCA is doing now may have played a role in people refinancing good mortgages and seeking out sub-prime loans out of fear of losing their homes.”

Health, Work Woes

forechouse.JPGHealth and employment problems dug Willie and Elaine Jackson in the hole that led to one creditor — WPCA — suing to take their home (pictured).

Elaine Jackson said she was already trying to make my way to get money” and work out a payment plan with the agency when she got hit with the lawsuit, which will now add hundreds of dollars of legal fees to her bill.

Her husband, who’s retired, has high blood pressure on top of the three strokes that eviscerated much of his short-term memory, she said. He’s on a defibrillator.

Jacksonmr.JPGMy husband’s [pictured] been on a fixed income. He was sick,” she said. On top of his bills, I was out of work for three months” last summer; she’s a Head Start teacher.

Jackson said she’s on a payment plan with the WPCA and is making extra payments to work down the debt. I’m going to do what I’ve got to do,” she said.

Echoes Of Breen, Yale-New Haven

The WPCA affair echoes two other episodes in the DeStefano Era involving debt collection.

The first involved City Hall. It sold tax liens to an out-of-state company in return for one-time cash. The company turned over debt-collection to a politically connected law firm, run by former Democratic State Chairman Ed Marcus. Homeowners struggling to keep their homes, some of them elderly and on fixed income, found themselves suddenly hundreds of dollars or more in further debt just from contacting the firm to find out what was going on. At the time Mayor DeStefano defended Marcus’s tactics, saying people should pay their bills. (Interestingly, both that tax lien deal, and the conversion of the WPCA as a state agency were cooked up as one-time revenue generators by Frank Altieri, who served as DeStefano’s budget chief until one too many ethics controversies forced him out of office.)

The second episode involved Yale-New Haven Hospital. The hospital employed law firms to go after patients with medical debts, sometimes quite small debts, and attach their homes. It filed 85 liens in just one seven-month period, sometimes against its own employees. The issue then was the same one as with the WPCA today: Not whether it has a right to go after debt, but why it was using tactics harsher than those employed by other agencies. The Hospital of St. Raphael, for instance, filed just five liens in the same seven-month period and worked harder at helping patients pay off bills. In today’s case, the Regional Water Authority doesn’t file foreclosure suits the way the WPCA does. (WPCA chief Dominick DiGangi noted that the sewer authority, unlike the water authority, can’t shut off service to collect debts.)

DeStefano was silent at the time on Yale-New Haven’s actions, but other politicians weren’t. Eventually the hospital fired its law firm and instituted a new policy.

Who Stands Where

A state foreclosure judge and legal-aid lawyers have criticized the WPCA (quoted in this article) for employing harsher collection tactics than other agencies — and thereby pushing families with already shaky finances closer to losing their owns at a time of a foreclosure crisis. (The WPCA so far has been able to get paid without claiming any homes, but only after loading the debtors with expensive new legal bills that make their situations more precarious.) State Reps. Bob Megna and Pat Dillon are looking into ways to pressure the agency to alter its collection tactics.

WPCA chief DiGangi told the Independent that the agency needs to act more aggressively to improve a 92 percent collection rate that has cost it more than $1 million that gets passed on to other ratepayers.

Mayor DeStefano has repeatedly said he has no problem with the tactics. He said he sees no reason to look into the debtors’ cases. In other instances DeStefano has declared he wants to help city families facing foreclosure in general; but his administration created the current problem when it spun off the WPCA as a private entity partly to gain one-time cash to plug a budget hole.

Also last week, Robin Golden, a member of the mayor’s foreclosure task force, said last week that she has no plans to look into the WPCA matter, possibly the single largest generator of local foreclosure suits with which the city might have influence.

Read previous Independent coverage of New Haven’s foreclosure crisis:

Ä¢ Sue The Subprimers?
Ä¢ WPCA Hearing Delayed
Ä¢ Megna’s Blood Boils” at WPCA Tactics
Ä¢ Goldfield Wants WPCA Answers
Ä¢ 2 Days, 8 Foreclosure Suits
Ä¢ WPCA Goes On Foreclosure Binge
Ä¢ A Guru Weighs In
Ä¢ WPCA Targets Church
Ä¢ Subprime Mess Targeted
Ä¢ Renters Caught In Foreclosure King’s Fall
Ä¢ She’s One Of 1,150 In The Foreclosure Mill
Ä¢ Foreclosures Threaten Perrotti’s Empire
Ä¢I’m Not Going To Lay Down And Let Them Take My House”

The following links are to various materials and brochures designed to help homeowners avoid foreclosure.

How to prepare a complaint to the Department of Banking; Department of Banking Online Assistance Form; Connecticut Department of Banking, Avoiding Foreclosure; FDIC Consumer News; Statewide Legal Services of Connecticut, Inc; Connecticut Bar Association Lawyer Referral Service.

For lawyer referral services in New Haven, call 562‑5750 or visit this website. For the Department of Social Services (DSS) Eviction Foreclosure Prevention Program (EFPP), call 211 to see which community-based organization in the state serves your town.

Click here for information on foreclosure prevention efforts from Empower New Haven.

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