GCAA Sends Letter to Chief Justice Newby to Address Mecklenburg County Court Delay
The Honorable Chief Justice Paul Newby
North Carolina Supreme Court
2 East Morgan Street
Raleigh, NC 27601-1428
Your Honor,
The Greater Charlotte Apartment Association represents the interests of apartment industry owners, managers and professional service providers across an 11-county footprint. Our membership includes more than 160,000 rental homes and 850+ apartment communities. We provide shelter for approximately 400,000 North Carolina residents.
Since the issuance of stay-at-home orders, our members have been proactive in offering rent concessions, fee waivers and flexible payment arrangements. Most management companies employed creativity in keeping families who could not pay in their homes well before Congress passed rental assistance legislation and enacted eviction moratoria.
It is unfortunate that policymakers continue to rely on eviction moratoria and inadequate emergency rental assistance to solve the crisis despite the fact that struggling renters continue to accrue insurmountable debt that will eventually become due. Landlords have been carrying the burden for more than a year and the time has now come when they can no longer do so.
With that in mind, we applaud your wisdom in declaring such directives as to restore NC Courts to safe, timely and effective proceedings. While the most recent CDC order extends the eviction moratorium for another 60 days, landlords in Mecklenburg County received an additional surprise as Clerk of Courts, Elisa Chinn-Gary, announced that eviction hearings would not be docketed for 60 days.
We see that decision as a unilateral attempt to contravene the Chief Justice’s directives. Numerous requests from our member representatives for clarifications have received ambiguous responses. Therefore, we ask Your Honor to intercede on our behalf. We would implore you to direct the Mecklenburg County Clerk of Courts to move swiftly to docket eviction hearings in order to dispose of accumulated cases and to administer justice without delay.
Your Honor has our sincere gratitude for your time and consideration of our request.
Respectfully,
Deidre Wilson
Board President
cc: Greater Charlotte Apartment Association Board of Directors