Senate panel seeks ways to expedite foreclosures: nonjudicial foreclosure options explored.

Any attempt to bring a nonjudicial foreclosure process to Florida might run afoul of the recent federal law tightening regulations on the financial industry, a Florida Senate committee has been told.

One member of the panel, though, said he thinks the courts can effectively reduce the backlog of foreclosure caseloads with some tweaks to existing state law.

The Senate Judiciary Committee on November 17 got a report on ways to speed up foreclosures. The panel at an earlier meeting examined the foreclosure backlog, which stands at more than 370,000 active and inactive cases, and past efforts to reduce it.

The report looked at Florida's existing foreclosure laws, nonjudicial foreclosures, and other factors affecting the state's housing crisis. Committee staffer Barry Monroe briefed senators on the report.

It noted that the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act "prohibits any contractual requirement that would impose the use of nonjudicial foreclosure as the process for mortgages on principal dwellings and for closed-end mortgages on secondary dwellings."

Monroe said the impact of the law is uncertain since that provision has not been litigated in the courts. But he added the state would have to carefully consider that if it wanted to use nonjudicial foreclosures to address the backlog and hundreds of thousands of foreclosures expected to be filed in the coming months and years.

The report put it this way: "To the extent the Dodd-Frank Act prohibition may be interpreted to prohibit contracts that would rely on the use of nonjudicial foreclosure as a means to foreclose a mortgage, it may have a chilling effect on any state's consideration of nonjudicial foreclosure options."

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Sen. David Simmons, R-Altamonte Springs, asked to see the specific language of the Dodd-Frank bill but said he doesn't think much change is needed to current state law to help speed judicial foreclosures.

"If someone really doesn't have a defense, then we can provide that the judgment be entered promptly, and we can move these things forward without any great difficulty," he said.

"I think the existing expedited process can be applied to residential foreclosures when there is no real dispute about nonpayment. We can use that to clean out the backlog, and I don't think that is going to have any kind of prohibition against using it on proceedings now in place .... I think with that and the hiring of some retired judges, we would be...