Governor M. Jodi Rell today celebrated legislation that extends for another two years the state’s judicial foreclosure mediation program – a program Governor Rell helped make mandatory in all foreclosures after it showed great promise in reducing the number of instances where people lost their homes. The new law keeps the foreclosure mediation program – which had been scheduled to end July 1of this year – running through July 1, 2012.
“Home is a wonderful word, isn’t it?” Governor Rell said during a bill-signing ceremony at the Windsor Locks home of Laura Wilson, who benefited from the mortgage mediation program. “Generations of Americans can recite the magic words that got Dorothy out of Oz and back to Kansas: ‘There’s no place like home.’ I do not have any ruby slippers with me today – but I do have a pen. And the State of Connecticut has a program that works: foreclosure mediation.
“This program, born out of desperate economic times, has helped keep families like the Wilsons in their home,” the Governor said. “In fact, the Connecticut program has been nationally recognized by the American Bar Association and the Center for American Progress. More than 7,100 cases have completed the mediation process through June 2010. Seventy-six percent of those cases have reached agreement and 62 percent – more than 4,400 cases – have allowed the homeowner to remain in their homes.
“Of course those are the statistics,” Governor Rell said. “Laura Wilson and her family are the faces behind those statistics. And this is their home.”
The legislation – House Bill 5270, An Act Concerning Foreclosure Mediation – also makes changes to the minimum amount that mortgagees or other successors in interest may offer to tenants to vacate a foreclosed residential property, establishing that the amount must be at least $2,000. The act specifies that for purposes of the homestead exemption for judgment debtors, “homestead” includes co-op properties.
