When You Can't Fight City Hall... Call Madame Mayor!
I had the occasion to be dealing with Cathedral City FD on a code compliance issue on one of my shortsale listings. Long story short... CCFD was going prevent me from closing a Shortsale today because the property had non compliant smoke detectors. CCFD was less than sympathetic even when it was explained to them that the Shortsale Bank took 6 ...months to approve the sale and then gave us only 11 days to close the transaction. In this case, 11 days was not sufficient time to have the old smoke detectors replaced and to get a compliance certificate from CCFD. (Due to budget constraints the city only performs these inspections once per week and only has a limited number of time slots available on that one day). So we begged CCFD for an exception to close... they said no. Told them we could have the new detectors in by this coming Monday... They said no. Told them that we had collected money in escrow to cover the cost of the new detectors installation... They still said no. Told them that if we don't close the Shortsale by the deadline today that there would be another foreclosed property in Cathedral City... Another vacant eyesore creating blight in an otherwise nice neighborhood... CCFD still said no! With nothing to lose and feeling a bit discouraged, I contacted Cathedral City Mayor Kathy DeRosa. I explained my plight and she immediately got me in touch with the City Manager, Andy Hall. The bottomline is that we got authorization from the City Manager to close the transaction and a needless foreclosure was averted. I am very impressed with the speed that this was handled. I am also impressed that Mayor Kathy DeRosa took the time to respond to my needs as a constituent and local business owner even though she was a few thousand miles away attending a conference in Washington DC... clearly this wasn't the most important thing on her docket, but she treated it as if it was. Thank you Madame Mayor and City Manager Hall. I am glad to see responsive and common sense government in action.
I had the occasion to be dealing with Cathedral City FD on a code compliance issue on one of my shortsale listings. Long story short... CCFD was going prevent me from closing a Shortsale today because the property had non compliant smoke detectors. CCFD was less than sympathetic even when it was explained to them that the Shortsale Bank took 6 ...months to approve the sale and then gave us only 11 days to close the transaction. In this case, 11 days was not sufficient time to have the old smoke detectors replaced and to get a compliance certificate from CCFD. (Due to budget constraints the city only performs these inspections once per week and only has a limited number of time slots available on that one day). So we begged CCFD for an exception to close... they said no. Told them we could have the new detectors in by this coming Monday... They said no. Told them that we had collected money in escrow to cover the cost of the new detectors installation... They still said no. Told them that if we don't close the Shortsale by the deadline today that there would be another foreclosed property in Cathedral City... Another vacant eyesore creating blight in an otherwise nice neighborhood... CCFD still said no! With nothing to lose and feeling a bit discouraged, I contacted Cathedral City Mayor Kathy DeRosa. I explained my plight and she immediately got me in touch with the City Manager, Andy Hall. The bottomline is that we got authorization from the City Manager to close the transaction and a needless foreclosure was averted. I am very impressed with the speed that this was handled. I am also impressed that Mayor Kathy DeRosa took the time to respond to my needs as a constituent and local business owner even though she was a few thousand miles away attending a conference in Washington DC... clearly this wasn't the most important thing on her docket, but she treated it as if it was. Thank you Madame Mayor and City Manager Hall. I am glad to see responsive and common sense government in action.
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