Cape Coral Maintains Foreclosed Homes for Auction
The city of Cape Coral is trying its best to maintain foreclosed homes for auction despite a decrease in budget for foreclosure maintenance programs.
According to Carl Schwing, assistant city manager, city revenues have been declining because of sharp drops in real estate tax revenues. In many cities across the country, city officials are facing budget cuts because of steep declines in property revenues as foreclosure properties keep on pushing down property values.
Across Cape Coral, property values have fallen by almost 50 percent in the past two years.
Since June 2007 when foreclosures began to worsen, Cape Coral has spent over $239,000 mowing the grounds of 4,534 foreclosed homes. That year, the budget for mowing was only $16,000, but the city was able to carry out maintenance for foreclosed properties.
For the next fiscal year, according to Frank Cassidy, manager of the Cape Coral Code Compliance Division, the budget for the division which supervises the maintenance of foreclosure properties is $2.38 million, a substantial decrease of 13.73 percent from this year’s budget. The division spends most of its budget to pay employees and its operating budget is currently at around $300,000.
The reduced budget meant the elimination of 9 employees – 7 code compliance officers, 1 section manager and 1 customer service officer.
Cassidy said that his division is going to be completely reactive because of the significant budget cut. Nearly his entire team of code enforcement was eliminated. He added that his division has become only 30 percent proactive.
The maintenance of abandoned foreclosed homes has been prioritized by Cassidy’s team because of the need to prevent neighborhood decay and the higher risk of crimes that comes with blight. The city sends personnel to mow lots, board up pools and remove trash.
Cape Coral has been hit hard by the foreclosure crisis. Last year, among all metro areas in the country, the metro area covered by Cape Coral and Fort Myers had the biggest foreclosure rate. In the first 6 months of this year, the Cape Coral area ranked second in foreclosure rate, second only to Las Vegas. One housing unit out of every 14 units in the metro area was hit with a default or foreclosure notice.
For the next fiscal year, city officials have set $116.4 million as its operating budget, a sharp drop of over $10 million from the current budget.
Nevertheless, Cassidy and fellow council official Gloria Tate said they will try their best to work within the budget.
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