Thanks to nearly 600 credit union supporters and staff who sent messages to California State Assembly legislators and made important phone calls to those offices within a 48-hour period, Senate Bill 1323 will not be moving forward!

“This is a great late-session win for credit unions throughout the state,” said Robert Wilson, senior vice president of state government affairs for the California Credit Union League. “The League would like to thank everyone who immediately sent a letter to their state assemblymember through our Connect for the Cause grassroots platform telling them to ‘Vote NO on SB 1323’.”

The League has agreed to work with Senator Bob Archuleta, author of SB 1323, on a bill during the next state legislative session that will accomplish the laudable goal of ensuring people with equity in their homes keep the equity even through the foreclosure process, while still preserving the non-judicial foreclosure process.

California’s legislative session is in its final weeks, ending at midnight on Aug. 31. SB 1323 would have rendered the non-judicial foreclosure process useless by inserting a forced sale (potentially against the homeowner’s will) into the non-judicial foreclosure process, which tramples the rights of any homeowner. It would have potentially increased the cost of lending across the state.

Other negative elements of the bill and potential consequences that the League argued included:

• Illegally forcing a trustee to sell a property by selecting a real estate agent at random from a database, all while the homeowner is still living in the home that is being foreclosed.
• Forced sales would have dramatically increased the non-judicial foreclosure process, which could have led to neighborhood blight and increased costs for lenders.
• Title companies warned that title insurance would not be available on these sales, which would have led to more institutional investors and wealthy cash buyers scooping up more properties. This goes directly against some of the changes the California State Legislature has made during previous sessions.
  
  

“This bill was a technical issue, but the real-world implications would have been very serious,” Wilson added. “Again, thank you to those who responded when we activated Connect for the Cause earlier this week. Your voices have helped achieve victory!”

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