Eric Sabree, left, Jerry Paffendorf. (Photos: Facebook)
If you didn't hear the big news this week, Wayne County Treasurer Eric Sabree, who has foreclosed on thousands of Detroit households with delinquent taxes, knowingly or unknowingly allowed his family to buy tax-foreclosed properties from the auction he oversees in violation of his office's rules.
The properties then racked up tens of thousands of dollars in tax debts, which were paid only once The Detroit News started sniffing around. One property should have been foreclosed, but wasn't.
Detroiters have been calling on Sabree to resign since the news broke. Tuesday afternoon, the Detroit Free Press' editorial board joined the chorus. On Wednesday, Wayne County Executive Warren Evans requested an ethics commission investigate.
But while changing the guy at the top may restore confidence in the office, at least one activist argues it would only be a first step to restoring confidence in the foreclosure process. For Loveland Technologies CEO Jerry Paffendorf, who ran against Sabree for treasurer in 2016, the ethics issues present an opportunity to rethink the system altogether.
Paffendorf makes the case in an essay published yesterday on his Patreon. For context, the 37-year-old Detroiter has been at the forefront of the fight over the Wayne County tax auction for years. He and other housing rights advocates have argued it must be shut down due to the government's failure to properly assess home values and allow residents in poverty to easily obtain exemptions. They've also said Wayne County cannot try to reduce tax delinquency in earnest when its budget depends on the late fees and interest.
Now, to Paffendorf's thoughts:
After all these years, when I read one of our major papers calling for the Treasurer to step down, it makes me reflect. Why is it stories like these that move the needle? What happens next if Treasurer Sabree steps down? Did he do something really bad or was he animated by the opportunities of an insane system that took hold during a depression and some of the city's darkest years, that has flooded up to 25,000 auction properties through his office at one time, where no one with power particularly seemed to care, and where the County Executive is relying on him to send delinquent tax and auction profits to the county's General Fund so it can publicize a surplus and pay for things it wants or needs?
For me, the answer is that it's not only about Treasurer Sabree, it is a system. All leadership in that entire office needs to be cleared out. It needs to be forced to enact new policies and to be transparent in how it does things — what it's efforts are, how they can be improved, not auctioning occupied homes, understanding how much money it's making and where it goes, and for goodness sake it needs to become invested in making sure that people can and are paying the appropriate amount of taxes on time to the city even if it loses them their current bonanza of penalties, fees, and interest.
Plugging a current Deputy Treasurer into that role is not going to change anything if they were hired to do exactly what is happening now. In my experience we're not looking at a deep bench of top-shelf change agents over there. We're looking at, largely, a group of people who have done this for a long time, or who joined recently and were fine with things, or who have seen it's a mess but have been playing political angles to advance in their own careers.
Paffendorf adds that he believes the "situation likely requires some sort of state or outside intervention." He attributes the recent drop in the number of occupied foreclosed homes to the efforts of organizations like the United Community Housing Coalition and Quicken Loans Community Fund.
The foreclosure prevention innovations that have been made in recent years for going door-to-door to counsel people, distributing easier Poverty Tax Exemption applications, and doing home buyback programs that now remove thousands of occupied homes from the auction have all been driven by third-parties and lawsuits, not internal political leadership. To get to a point of progress has been like pulling teeth.
Related coverage:
Warren Evans Asks Prosecutor and County Ethics Board to Look into Treasurer Scandal, Feb. 13
