Sheriff Dart Fined for Slow Evictions

Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart who gained fame a few years ago by refusing to enforce evictions is foreclosure cases has been slammed by a Cook County Judge and ordered to pay a landlord $1400 for taking until February 16, 2010 to enforce an eviction order entered on August 24, 2009. That's about a six month wait. The Sheriff's office argues that manpower shortages, eviction backlogs, and a problem with the eviction order caused the delay.

Landlords are often surprised that it takes so long for the Sheriff to enforce an eviction. In my experience, the winter is always worse for evictions. Because of the holiday eviction moratorium and the delays caused by inclement weather, evictions in the winter used to back up quite a bit. These days, despite changes in the procedures at the Sheriff's office that allow for less time spent by the officers enforcing evictions, evictions take six to eight weeks in the good times and ten or eleven weeks during the winter.

Worse yet, the Sheriff's office has procedures in place to assist the elderly, disabled, and people with children with their move out. This sounds good in theory, but in practice, it adds a great deal of time to the process. There are bad apples out there among the ranks of both Landlords and Tenants, however, a Landlord with a mortgage can't afford to wait as long as it currently takes to get their tenants out.

Convenience Accounts in Illinois

Beginning on Janaury 1, 2010, a new law, the Illinois Banking Convenience Account for Depositors Act, went into effect. The law provides a new way to add another person to a bank account without making the account a gift or a pay on death with that other person. Illinois banking institutions may now offer "convenience accounts". The person establishing the account can designate another party who will have the right to deposit and withdraw from the account without the right to take over the account as a gift upon the death of the person establishing the account. This can be an effective tool for people who need help doing bills or doing bank transactions but who do not wish to have a co-owner or to remove the account from that person's other estate planning instructions. The law has a sunset provision, so it expires in 2015.