St. Lucie County, the poster child for Florida's growing mortgage crisis, is seeing the first ripple of the coming wave of home foreclosures.
The civil court is adding night hours to keep up with the caseload.
Home foreclosures have jumped to 715 filings a month from 40 to 45 before. So clerks will put in extra hours, working till 9 p.m. four days a week, to catch up, Clerk of Courts Edwin M. Fry Jr. told the Stuart News.
"The case load has become just horrendous," Fry said, "and we're trying to find a solution."
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"It's just killing us."
Court staff had already been working on Saturdays for the past four months, but can't keep up.
For now, paying overtime is more efficient than training new workers, and it's far from clear how long and deep the crisis will be.
"The number of foreclosures doesn't look like it's going to slow down this year, so we might be doing this for a long time," Fry said.
Florida’s total of 30,178 properties with at least one foreclosure filing is the nation’s second-highest state total after California, according to foreclosure tracker RealtyTrac.
The state’s foreclosure activity was up nearly 158 percent from January 2007. Texas is No. 3 nationwide.
Action was necessary. Foreclosure filings threatened to backlog the entire court system if nothing was done now, Fry said.
"We're obligated to take every case we get and handle it in a timely manner," Fry said.
"The whole court system relies on us getting this work done. We keep asking attorneys out there to be patient," he said.
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