Click here to find downloads on the 'Protect Our Homes' Ballot Initiative for REALTORS® only.  Ballot Measure Bans Transfer Taxes!!!  ...
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This is your legislative update for April 25, 2008. Last week, the Arizona House and Senate finally reached an agreement on the state budget adjustments for fiscal year 2008. The deal includes: $311.5 million in cuts; $487 million to be used from the Rainy Day Fund; $272 million in K-12 rollover dollars; and $300 million in fund sweeps.  While the agreement did not include bonding for new school construction, there is speculation that the fiscal year 2009 budget could include a retroactive bonding mechanism. The total adjustments agreed to for the fiscal year 2007-2008 budget totaled $1.37 billion. The bill, HB2620: BUDGET; FISCAL 07-08; ADJUSTMENTS, has been transmitted ...
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The National Association of REALTORS ® supports the independence of appraisers and the integrity of the appraisal process.  We recognize the New York State Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo and both government sponsored enterprises (GSE), Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, for their efforts to address appraisal fraud in the mortgage industry.  While the agreement addresses appraisal fraud, we have concerns with the implementation of the proposed “New Home Valuation Protection Code” through the newly created “Independent Valuation Protection Institute.”   NAR has met with GSE regulator, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO), to disc ...
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On March 3, Freddie Mac announced that we would join with the New York State Attorney General and our regulator, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO), to implement the Home Valuation Code of Conduct. We share the New York State Attorney General's goal of enhancing the independence of appraisers to protect the integrity of the appraisal process. To accomplish this on an industry-wide level, with the guidance and at the direction of our regulator, OFHEO, we joined with OFHEO and the New York Attorney General in this agreement to implement and require Freddie Mac Seller/Servicers to adopt the Home Valuation Code of Conduct.  In addition, we will be working with th ...
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Guidelines For Volunteer Petition Signature Gathering·        The top of the front page of the petition should have no blanks and must be filled out entirely.  Please fill in the blanks with the initiative information, including the county in which you are gathering signatures.  You also need to check the box “VOLUNTEER” before circulating the petition.·        Only registered voters can sign the petition, but they do not have to fill in their address personally.  You can offer to fill in that information for the voters, but they must sign their own names, and you must make sure eac ...
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©The East OregonianByline: Kathy Aney Five Eastern Oregon counties, including Wallowa County, will be acting as a single cooperating agency in the ongoing negotiations with the Wallowa-Whitman Forest Service over road closures. Wallowa County Commissioner Mike Hayward - who spoke via conference call with the Forest Service and commissioners from other counties on Friday, April 11 - reports that the five participating counties are Wallowa, Union, Baker, Umatilla and Grant. The counties' position is that of "experts in social and economic impact," Hayward said. They also will need to act in concert in order to make sure counties are properly represented.   ...
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©The Daily SentinelByline: Gary Harmon Water wars in the East should serve as a warning to Colorado to store more water, Sen. Wayne Alllard, R-Colo., told Western Slope leaders on Saturday. Allard, who is in the final year of his second term as senator, said that droughts have sapped water in the East and that fights such as that between Tennessee and Georgia could be previews to water fights in the West. To avert fights over the state’s water, Colorado must immediately figure out how to store the 1.2 million acre-feet the state has been allotted under the compact that divvies up the Colorado River and its tributaries, Allard told Club 20, the Western Slope lobbying ...
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© The Boston GlobeByline: Michael G. Bellotti and Joseph D. McDonald  County sheriffs face a long list of issues in operating correctional facilities: drugs, gangs, overcrowding, healthcare, and mental illness, to name a few. But one of their worries shouldn't be keeping a close eye on the local real estate market. Currently, seven of the state's 14 county sheriffs receive their funding from the state budget. The remaining seven are funded through a convoluted county system that relies on revenue from a tax on real estate transactions. That unpredictable revenue stream is the reason sheriffs have been asking the state to shift to a better funding mechanism. Govern ...
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© The Washington PostByline: Jonathan MummoloThroughout the Washington suburbs, the economic downturn has accomplished what the slow-growth movement could not: It has slowed growth significantly. Once the dominant topic in regional politics, taming residential development has largely been eclipsed by the fiscal woes created by the slowdown. Rising construction costs, plummeting property assessments, soaring foreclosures and high gas prices have local officials debating how to craft budgets with limited resources instead of arguing over new subdivisions. Growth "was the most salient issue and politically sensitive issue between the late 1990s and up through as late as 2006 ...
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© The Orlando Business JournalByline: Kent Hoover  A bipartisan group of senators think they've found a way to overcome objections that have derailed past efforts to reduce health insurance costs for small businesses.  New legislation introduced by Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, would encourage states to set up health care purchasing pools for small businesses and the self-employed. The Small Business Health Options Program also calls for the establishment of a nationwide purchasing pool in 2011.  The bill, which was crafted after a year of negotiations among senators and various interest groups, also would provide a tax credit to self-empl ...
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