President of National Conference of Bar Presidents issues national plea
By Steve Patterson
Florida Times-Union
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (AP) — Jacksonville attorney Mike Freed has left his mark locally cultivating an annual series of marathons raising money for Jacksonville Area Legal Aid.
Now he’s asking lawyers around the country to donate their time to help to help prevent a deluge of evictions rooted in the pandemic’s effect on jobs and incomes.
“Sometimes you have to give up your time without compensation for the greater good,” said Freed, who is president of the National Conference of Bar Presidents, an organization involving Bar associations in 53 states and U.S. territories.
Freed, an attorney at the Gunster law firm who organizes a yearly six-day series of six marathons called Freed to Run, used online messages to highlight a letter U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland signed last week asking lawyers to prevent an eviction tsunami.
“Over three million households that are behind on rental payments believe they may be evicted in the next two months. The impact of evictions on these families would be devastating,” Garland wrote. “… (N)o matter where you live, lawyers and law students like you can apply your legal training and skills to help your community.”
Coming days after the U.S. Supreme Court threw out a federal moratorium on evictions during the pandemic, the pleas reacted to a situation that is growing more dire for many tenants.
In Duval County, judges hearing eviction lawsuits last month issued 530 orders for police to serve writs of possession and take homes back from renters.
It was the highest monthly count of writs this year, raising the year’s total to 2,521.
Landlords filed another 737 eviction lawsuits last month, or 5,453 for the year.
The National Conference circulated a plea last week for lawyers nationwide to work with courts on steps to try to handle rent problems without evictions it said could overwhelm courts across the country.
“Attorneys can make an enormous difference in a family’s ability to preserve housing,” said an appeal from the group that asked attorneys to volunteer with legal aid outfits and work with courts on developing diversion programs to handle back-rent cases out of court.
Eviction notices like these, pasted to an apartment door along Arlington’s Bourbon Alley South, have been posted at thousands of rental homes in Jacksonville this year despite pandemic-based eviction moratoriums by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Florida tenants have to follow very specific requirements to be protected by moratorium rules, and many people don’t take the proper steps.
In Jacksonville, the fact that the city reopened its Emergency Rental Assistance Portal (ERAP) on Friday means lawyers have better chances of really being helpful, JALA CEO Jim Kowalski said.
“As you know, Jacksonville’s program was dormant from April through today, and without the ERAP funds, the ability of lawyers to impact evictions is limited,” Kowalski said by email. “Now that these funds are available, there may be more of an opportunity.”
Jacksonville’s rent aid program has distributed about $15 million to 2,890 households, said Sarah Henderson, a spokeswoman for United Way of Northeast Florida, which has been handling the applications. The ERAP portal reopened to use about $10 million that’s left over.
Evicting a renter without using that aid money means the landlord loses a way to recoup thousands of dollars in back rent a delinquent ex-tenant won’t be able to pay, the National Conference pointed out.
Losing that money can have terrible effects on landlords too, especially small investors who own one or two properties and need that income to pay their own bills, said Freed, the former head of two local Bar organizations.
Because the rent assistance system uses information from both tenants and landlords, Freed said sometimes both sides just need someone to talk them through the application process.
He said he’d talked this week with a University of Florida legal clinic about volunteering with JALA and elsewhere, and said there are people who can deliver needed help.
“A lot of what’s needed is not heavy lifting as far as legal work,” Freed said.
Some property owners have had to navigate patchworks of assistance programs from around the state, said Amanda White, government affairs director for the Florida Apartment Association. “This involved learning the varying application processes for dozens of programs and communicating program details to residents,” said White, who said the association has used webinars, email blasts and other tools to try to educate landlords.
But Freed said lawyers can help a lot to resolve their rent problems as well as possible.
“Our profession is uniquely positioned,” he said, “... (for) contributing the time and talent necessary and available within our ranks to avert the devastating impacts of the eviction crisis.”
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