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Senator goal raised - donate now!
posted by
Michael Zoldessy
on
February 17, 2007 at 12:50 pm
BALTIMORE, MD — As reported yesterday, the Senator Theatre is just days away from going up for auction. Its lender is now making them provide $109K by this Wednesday, February 21st at 1:30PM. As of 6:32 EST, today, $68.4K has been collected.
Please donate via paypal on their website and pass this message along to others.
We’ll update you with the latest on the fight to keep this movie palace alive.
Comments (4)
Why and how on earth does the bank raise the amount needed by another $20k? I don’t see an explanation on their forums. Such a greedy bank. Whoever has an account there should close it in protest if they go through with the auction.
In mortgage foreclosure situations, in order to stop a foreclosure proceeding once a court complaint has been filed, the debtor must not only bring the mortgage current, but also pay the bank’s “court costs”. These “court costs” include not only the court filing and the sale advertising fees, but almost always also include the bank’s attorney fees as well.
Although the modern trend is to state that the debtor has to pay “reasonable attorney fees”, many older mortgages used to provide (and some still contain the provision today) that the debtor had (has) to pay a fixed percentage of the total amount of the entire mortgage as “attorney fees”. The minimum percentage was (is) at least 5% of the total outstanding mortgage (regardless of the amount actually past due).
All ‘attorney fee" mortgage provisions are a windfall for the bank’s attorneys who get paid what amounts to hundreds of dollars per hour for doing very little work – and most of that work consists of fill-in the blank standard word processing complaint and mortgage foreclosure forms.
I would guess the additional 20K being sought here is for the ubiquitous “court costs”.
Sadly letting any mortgage go into to foreclosure to the point where a complaint is filed in court and a sale is scheduled and the halting the sale is an expensive way of financing.
I gave a small donation to this cause. I encourage the rest of you to do the same. We spend a lot of time in this forum discussing how things should be. The Senator situation is an opportunity for preservationists of all economic classes to help save one of the nation’s great cinema sites without putting forth much effort.
I’ve now PayPal-ed in a contribution of my own, and I would also encourage everybody to do the same. As of my visit to the Senator website this afternoon, donations were up to slightly more than $88,000; therefore it’s still possible to make the difference between halting the sale and foreclosure on the 21st. And since I assume some local equivalent of Paul Allen (the “savior” of the Seattle Cinerama) didn’t step forward to make a jumbo-sized donation, that $88,000-plus certainly was raised via lots of dribs and drabs.
By the way, the closest I’ve ever come to setting foot inside the place was driving past it while on a business trip in Baltimore three years ago. So I’ve got no nostalgic memories of the Senator itself to motivate me, just a sense that this is something worth saving.