Chapter 257 is back, Ugh!
You may remember a law on the books during Covid times that prohibited judgment from entering while an application for rental assistance was pending. That law expired and we were able to obtain judgments despite applications for rental assistance. Unfortunately, as part of the State Budget there was an Amendment to the statute that controls Summary Process (Chapter 239). This change is very similar to the stay that was put in place under Chapter 257. Now, in a nonpayment of rent case if a person has a pending application for rental assistance the Court shall issue a stay of execution and shall not enter a judgment or issue execution before the application has been approved or denied.
Our analysis is that this new law means that there will likely be more continuances because of pending RAFT applications, no matter when those applications are filed (even at the last minute). This will result in more delays unfortunately. Because we cannot control the statute it is now more important than ever that we serve and file our non-pay cases as quickly as possible once a resident falls behind. We are working very hard to speed up our process to meet your needs.
More court delays yay!
We also wanted to reach out to you about the length of time between a case being filed and the first court event. Back in the day we were only looking at a matter of weeks between service and the trial date! Now once we file the case with the Court, the new Standing Order requires the “first tier court event” to be scheduled 30-60 days after the case is entered. This is so the court can produce the “notice of first tier court event” for us to have it served by constable. By doing this, the Court has delayed the process by an additional month or two!
We understand this extra time can be frustrating, but it is how the Court is required to schedule cases under the new standing order. The only good news here is that the cost of this may be recovered as court costs. Make sure to add this additional court cost to your ledgers. So, court costs now include the following: