Appeal to turn over sheriff's sales to Philly courts

The Philadelphia Sheriff's Office, worried about the ability to execute the next round of sheriff's sales, scheduled for March, formally backed a proposal Tuesday to permanently transfer control of the property-foreclosure process to the Philadelphia court system.

But while that action is pending - the Pennsylvania Supreme Court must approve the move - the Nutter administration says it, too, is equipped to take over functions from the Sheriff's Office.

In a meeting in the mayor's office Friday, city officials distributed a draft memorandum of understanding in which the administration would absorb at least some of the sheriff's real estate functions.

The meeting ended with no agreed-upon resolution, though, as more questions than answers surfaced.

"The agreement would not simply focus on the sheriff's-sale process. Obviously, there are many other responsibilities within the Sheriff's Office," Nutter spokesman Mark McDonald said. "We don't have an agreement, so we are not able to discuss what those terms are yet."

He said the mayor, the Sheriff's Office, and the courts were working collaboratively on an outcome.

"There are a lot of nitty-gritty details," said Common Pleas Court President Judge Pamela Pryor Dembe, who attended the meeting, along with Acting Sheriff Barbara Deeley, Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Everett Gillison, Chief of Staff Clay Armbrister, and City Solicitor Shelley Smith.

Decisions yet to be made included who would be in charge of producing and recording detailed data about foreclosure transactions, and of physically conducting auctions and evictions, Dembe said.

Until now, those functions were handled by the Sheriff's Office, an independent agency with a $13 million budget and 230 employees.

It is responsible for transporting prisoners to and from court, providing courtroom security, serving legal papers, enforcing evictions - and handling sheriff's sales.

Under recently retired Sheriff John D. Green, those sales were conducted in coordination with a private company, Reach Communications.

But as acting sheriff, Deeley - Green's No. 2 for years - severed ties with Reach Communications earlier this month after the city controller raised potential fraud and mismanagement allegations.

Reach Communications was responsible for advertising sheriff's sales and handling title work for many of the transactions.

Controller Alan Butkovitz's findings centered on the lack of records provided to his auditors by Green's staff concerning bank accounts holding $53 million. Most of that money was related to real estate transactions resulting from sheriff's sales.

Deeley's concern now is her office's lack of the computer equipment, even servers, necessary to carry out sheriff's sales once they resume March 16.

James Davis, owner of Reach Communications and RCS Searchers, both of which did work for the Sheriff's Office, has questioned how the office's real estate division would function without his company's programs and backup information. Davis estimated that his companies made between $1.5 million and $2 million annually from the Sheriff's Office, which constituted about 70 percent of his business. Davis' companies employ 42 people, and he said he has already had to lay off eight people.

Davis said he had developed applications over the years, on an emergency basis, that allowed the Sheriff's Office to better extract information on a system that was continually on the verge of collapse. The city has been working on a replacement system since 2003, he said - a contract his company did not get.

Working with permission from the city's Division of Technology, Davis said, his staff had come up with a more advanced system, using his own servers, that would provide better access until the city revamped the system. His patch system was to go online Jan. 10 - but Reach was cut off Jan. 7.

"Most of our expansion came out of our efforts to help and support the sheriff, to make sure that office did not fail," Davis said. "I'm hopeful that we'll be able to get this business back. I thought we did a good job, and I'm still not clear why we were terminated in that manner."

In an interview Wednesday, Deeley said, "This timetable requires me to make decisions with respect to the infrastructure, which at present this office does not have to conduct the sale."

Consequently, she wrote Dembe: "As these sales arise out of judicial orders, I hereby request that the First Judicial District assume the responsibility for conducting these sales."

Last week, Dembe said the court system - which recently absorbed the functions of the now-abolished Clerk of Quarter Sessions Office - has computer software that can manage or form the framework for additional information generated by sheriff's sales.

In an interview Wednesday, Dembe said she was open to discussing a sharing of responsibilities with the administration. But she also expressed concern about the fast-approaching timeline for the resumption of sheriff's sales, which have been postponed for 50 days.

"It's troubling," Dembe said, "if we can't get something moving quickly."