Thursday, February 23, 2012

This morning E Court Judges Durkin and Walsh met with the Senate Natural Resources Committee on the permit reform issues the committee is studying: whether to replace the E Court with a “PSB like” professional board and whether appeals should be “on the record”; de novo; or a “modified on the record”. The judges were able to review caseload statistics with the committee as well as present on the court’s jurisdiction; staffing, etc. The judges were able to respond to some of the criticisms leveled at the court by the ANR/NRB report and, without endorsing one legislative approach over another, spoke to the potential issues that would arise if a reform were to be adopted. The committee spent about 30 minutes more than the allotted time for the hearing as they sat listening intently for that time.


Now that it appears that the committee may be coming to the end of taking testimony, it’s soon time to make some decisions. Those decisions will have to be made on the basis of what the members want; what the Senate may adopt: what the House is likely to go along with; and what the governor will accept. There are a lot of moving parts and I can’t say what the result will be. Some things are unacceptable to the House; some to the governor. So where does the committee go? Should this be left for another biennium when ANR and the NRB will have two years to shepherd this through? Would they be willing to back off now? Will the Senate Committee feel as though, after investing this much time, it needs to pass something? We may know more before the Town Meeting break.

Yesterday afternoon many of us played the waiting game to get a hearing at House Judiciary on H. 600, the foreclosure mediation bill. It didn’t happen. And it’s not going to happen tomorrow; so it’s off the calendar until next week if not after Town Meeting. But foreclosure mediators reading this should take note that the committee is looking at a rotation process for mediators. It is also asking us to do an updated training for mediators. The VBA has tentatively scheduled a CLE for you on Thursday, June 28th at Capitol Plaza. There have been changes to HAMP, which as you know has been extended to 12/31/2013.

H. 600 also anticipates the creation of a study committee to work on tweaks to the process adopted in 2010 in H. 590. No action has yet been taken on that portion of the proposal. I’ll report on it as soon as I have a sense of what’s happening.

As always, thanks for reading.