Sheriff says he's changed the system, will restart evictions

Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said Thursday he will resume evictions at foreclosed homes and apartment buildings beginning Monday, confident that he and the court system have put adequate protections in place to protect renters' due process.

"We've been given adequate assurance that we're not going to be asked to evict innocent tenants," said Dart in announcing the move.

Dart had announced the suspension of foreclosure evictions on Thursday of last week, saying that he was not confident banks were giving adequate notice to renters.

By law, renters of units whose owners have not paid their mortgages must be given 120 days notice to vacate before an eviction can be carried out. Dart said that even though representations were sometimes made that notice had been given, it often wasn't.

People "were doing everything right (paying their rent) ... yet all of the sudden, they were being asked to leave," said Dart.

To illustrate how untruthful some of the representations had been in the past, Dart displayed a picture of a piece of property from which he was court-ordered to evict tenants. When his deputies arrived, they discovered the property had burned down five years ago, unbeknown to bankers or the court.

Dart said his deputies had tried to deal with the foreclosure problem by making individual determinations on a case-by-case basis, but that became unmanageable as foreclosures skyrocketed. In Northwest Suburban Cook, for example, the department performed 373 mortgage foreclosures by this time last year. This year, the number is 626.

Dart believes the problem has been addressed because Cook County Chancery Division Presiding Judge Dorothy Kinnaird worked with him to provide new forms that must be sworn to by bank representatives or their lawyer before an eviction can begin.

The new form, says Dart, gives him what he wanted: "somebody who signed a piece of paper (who has) something to lose."

Bankers or their lawyers must now swear that notice was given, and they must give an exact date that their representatives were out at the property. That's crucial, he said, because unscrupulous owners sometimes begin a lease with a tenant after a foreclosure lawsuit is filed, Dart said.

Although none of the protections are new, Dart acknowledged, they have been codified into the court procedure and someone must swear that they have been adhered to. In addition, Dart said, deputies will continue to call off evictions if they arrive at a property and find a renter there who has not received 120-day notice.