Property rights are under attack again in Oregon this year by the State Constitution and by the Oregon Legislature! State Legislators refused again to give my Foreclosure Reform Bill (Senate Bill 929) a hearing for the second straight year! This fifteen year old Bill, first written and drafted as Oregon House Bill 3453, in the 1995 Legislative Session, was allowed to die in committee again, in Salem this year! There was just not a lot of support for the Bill. Apparently there are a lot more important things for our State Legislators to do in Salem, than to make sure that our Oregon State Constitution conforms to the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights! For the benefit of all of our Oregon legislators, who have never read it, the ‘Takings Clause’ of the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution, which is a part of the Bill of Rights, reads as follows, “Nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.” For the rest of this story read on.
Once upon a time there was a little boy and girl, who lived happily together with their parents, in a little house in Oregon, out in the country. Time passed, and as the years went by, the children grew up, their parents died, the house grew old, and so did the little boy and girl. A little community sprang up all around them, but the two siblings, who never married, never left home either. Then one day, along came a big bad wolf in disguise, actually it was two big bad wolves, Lane County and the City of Eugene, and together they huffed and they puffed, and while they didn’t actually blow the house down, it’s still there today with some alterations, they did blow Jack and Betty Neely right out of their home, the only home they’d ever known! Homelessness, followed by a heart attack and the untimely death of her brother, broke Betty Neely’s heart and she quietly left Oregon several years later! What we have here is a deplorable situation and a very horrible law, ORS 223.525, that violates the US Constitution and needs to be changed in this year’s session of the Oregon Legislature! Read on:
Retrospective: Eugene Oregon, 1995
Foreclosure Reform Bill, HB 3453 passes Oregon House 43-7 but companion bill languishes in Senate
In 1995 after a protracted dispute over a sewer assessment lien, the City of Eugene foreclosed on the childhood home of Jack and Betty Neely at 1600 Horn Lane, Eugene Oregon. Then Lane County evicted the elderly siblings, Jack age 76 and Betty age 66, and sold their home at a public sale at the county courthouse to the lone bidders, Marilyn Goss and Leroy Bench of Eugene for $7,411, the exact amount of the lien against it! The Neely home had been last appraised at $63,710. That forfeiture was quite a boondoggle for Goss and Bench!
Except for the sewer assessment lien, the property was owned free and clear by the Neely’s, and there were no other recorded liens against the deed. The difference between the appraised value and the amount that the property sold for at foreclosure was $56,299. This was the equity that Jack and Betty Neely had in their home. It was their life savings! It was effectively stolen from them by the City of Eugene and Lane County in order to perfect a $5000 sewer lien and then handed over to Marilyn Goss and Leroy Bench, currently of 2128 W 28th St., Eugene Oregon. They bought the Neely house for $7,411and sold it 5 years later in 1999 for $100,650 and meanwhile they purchased a much nicer house in the South Eugene Hills for $158,000, with the equity that rightfully belonged to Jack and Betty Neely!
Following the foreclosure on their house and their subsequent eviction, Jack Neely died homeless, one month later of a heart attack, and Betty Neely was forced to go into Public assistance housing. She got an apartment at Yapoah Terrace. I’m sure they couldn’t believe that their country would actually do this to them. Jack died broken hearted. In 2005 Betty Neely left Oregon and moved south to California where she still lives with family members today. It was a tragic story and an often forgotten one in the history of Eugene, and in the struggle between “Big Development” and the residents of Lane County.
Many members of Eugene’s political establishment were around back then and they are still around today, as well as the same horrible law, ORS 223.525 that did the Neely’s in! Mayor Kitty Piercy was then a freshman assemblywoman representing River Road and Santa Clara who only reluctantly agreed to sponsor the reform bill, HB 3453. Floyd Prozanski was a state assemblyman from South Eugene in 1995 but he was officially excused from voting on the bill. Peter Sorenson was a state senator from Eugene who was not at all helpful in supporting the bill. In 2009, I asked then state senator Floyd Prozanski to sponsor a new version of HB 3453. It did not even receive a hearing that year in the Democrat controlled legislature. Floyd told me that they were very busy that year in Salem. Commissioner Peter Sorenson said he would work to bring some kind of reforms at the County level but then he never got back to me!
The horrible law which allowed the Neely’s to loose everything and even cost Jack Neely his life, is still on the books today. The danger is still there! ORS 223.525 is a deplorable law! It requires that a property in foreclosure be sold for no more than the actual amount of the lien against it! That’s correct, you could lose your home in a government foreclosure for the exact amount of an unpaid lien! This violates the “Nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation” Clause of the 5th Amendment to the US Constitution commonly referred to as the “Takings Clause.” In 1995 I wrote Oregon HB 3453 to correct his inequity. If it had passed, it would have prohibited the government, when foreclosing on private property, from selling it for the exact amount of a lien. Instead it would have required the government to sell the property for not less than 80% of its fair market value and return to the judgment debtor, the balance of the sale price after the lien and interest, and all costs associated with conducting the sale were deducted. At least that would be just compensation! It passed the Oregon House 43-7, but a companion bill SB 572 died in the Senate.
Editors Note: One aspect of what Eugene did in forcing the residents of River Road and Santa Clara to hook up to the Eugene Municipal Sewer System without jurisdiction and without actually even representing them was later declared to be illegal, in the Oregon Appellate Court, in the City of Eugene v. Kashin/Nalven.
ANALYSIS: So much for Jack and Betty Neely’s high principles! Marilyn Goss and Leroy Bench of Eugene took $7,411 and paid off the Neely’s original sewer assessment lien of $5,000 plus interest, and then regardless of the Neely’s high principles, and with the assistance of the City of Eugene, Lane County and the State of Oregon, they converted that $5,000 bill for sewers (which was illegal) into a $158,000 house in Eugene’s Southwest hills for themselves! The law that allowed this horrible injustice to occur to the Neely’s is ORS 223.525. It must be repealed or amended to conform to the US Constitution! HB 3453 or SB 929 needs to be reintroduced in the legislature and passed in order to protect all private property owners in Oregon and in order to bring the Oregon State Constitution into compliance with the United States Constitution!
You can read more of Scott’s work at www.LessGovIsTheBestGov.com.



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A little rag tag group of not more than nineteen airplane hijackers, directed by one evil mastermind from a remote cave in north eastern Afghanistan, terrorized America on September 11, 2001 and literally sent shock waves through the world community that reverberated all the way from New York to Bombay and back! These shock waves set off a scare that hijacked the whole world, and has held us all hostage ever since! 9-11 was more than ten years ago, and even though all of the hijackers are surely dead, and Osama bin Laden is supposedly dead too, nevertheless we are all acting like we are living in fear, and we are allowing our government to keep us in this continuous state of fear, so much so that the Patriot Act is still thought by many to be necessary today, –
The only time in our nation’s history that American citizens were subjected to this kind of preemptory action by our own government was during the Civil War, and very briefly during World War II. All of this is being done today in the name of fighting terror. I’m starting to become more terrorized by my own Federal government than I am of any foreign threat! What about you? All this is being done under the pretense of fighting a “Global War on Terror” for which no actual Declaration of War has ever been issued! This is what Ron Paul is trying to warn us about! And he is not the only one who is sounding the alarm, – more than ten years after the original attacks on New York! Are we ever going to be able to go back to a normal pre 9-11 existence, and a normal attitude with respect to individual liberty and the Bill of Rights? If we don’t reverse this slippery slide into despotism right now, then I don’t think that there will be many of us left who can remember what “normal” was really like in America! There are just too many young men and women alive today, who were born after 1990, who have grown up under the Patriot Act, who actually don’t know anything different. They think that strip searches at airports, pat downs, and a myriad of other more than just mere inconveniences are all perfectly normal! That’s the real danger in all of this. That soon, another generation of Americans will have grown up, who will never know what it was really like to be free!
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The last serious attack on our country was over ten years ago! Right now we allow ourselves to be seriously interrogated at airports, scanned like a box of fruit loops at a checkout stand, only with radar detecting devices instead of light emitting diodes, and we are patted down before we are allowed to board a plane, or a train. While that may still be necessary in order to keep the skies and the rails safe, there are city engineers who are installing cameras in most major cities of the world, just in order to monitor what goes on in the streets! And they are creating new laws like
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Today, some so-called conservative pundits, and radio and TV talk show hosts, sound very much like real conservatives. But they are actually wolves in sheep’s clothing! They are trying to derail the TEA Party train! They are trying to suck the wind from the TEA Party’s sails! They use the same jargon that real conservatives use, and if it is possible, and you can count on the fact that it is possible, they will deceive the very conservative voters that they are trying to influence.
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Nibbling Away at Our Bill of Rights
So then if we can just remember these things, then maybe the same fervor that stirred up our country’s founders will also enable us to prove ourselves worthy of their sacrifices. Let us at least try to prove ourselves worthy of all that those before us have accomplished. Amen.
You can read more of Scott’s work at www.LessGovIsTheBestGov.com.