Sacramento senior fixed code violations a year ago. She may still lose her home

Linda Siegrist could lose her childhood home — the home that she now shares with her husband — and become one of Sacramento’s 9,300 homeless residents.

Her home has been taken over by a private company that put it up for auction in February. On Thursday the company will ask a judge to approve the sale to Bay Area real estate agent Alex Lehr for $220,000.

The trouble started in 2017 when the city of Sacramento sued Siegrist for a broken down pickup truck and items piled up in her North Sacramento driveway. The city then asked a judge to appoint the Bay Area Receivership Group to take over control of the house to fix the violations, and a judge agreed.

Since taking control of the house in March 2021, the private company has so far charged them $248,000, according to court documents, despite performing no serious renovations.

The bill continued to grow — often by hundreds of dollars per day for expenses like phone calls and emails — even though the house has been clear of all code violations for over a year, according to city records.

The house went up for auction, and Siegrist faced the possibility of eviction. BARG wrote in a court filing this month that Lehr will allow Linda Siegrist and her husband Bruce to stay in their house as renters. But the receivership group has also taken recent steps toward evicting them, court documents show.

BARG on March 22 contacted an eviction attorney to “inquire on unlawful detainer costs and timing to evict,” the company wrote in a court document. The firm charged the Siegrists $202 for researching how to evict them.

Linda Siegrist, a double amputee in a wheelchair, suffers from diabetes and kidney issues. Her doctors are trying to figure out why she needs blood transfusions every two weeks, Siegrist said, and are planning important medical procedures this week. She wants to heal from the surgeries from the comfort of her own bed, in the North Sacramento house she grew up in, she said. She fears she will be kicked out Thursday.

“It’s like these people are trying to kill me,” said Siegrist, 67, referring to BARG. “It’s very stressful right now. We’re just nice ordinary people. I don’t need this.”

The city earlier this month filed a court document asking Judge Richard K. Sueyoshi to block the sale. The city claims BARG has overcharged Siergrist up to $61,000 in fees, citing The Bee’s reporting, and asks for an audit of the billing practices.

“Coincidentally, the receiver returned to the court’s approved billing rates at, or about, the same time as the Sacramento Bee’s investigative news story was published on September 25, 2022,” the city filing states. “In that article the receiver received sharp criticism for excessive billing rates in other cases.”

The city continued in the filing to question whether BARG had fulfilled its court-authorized duty to protect the property in a way that benefits the homeowner and city residents in light of the fact that the “excessive billing practices” failed to translate into any renovations.

City Attorney Susana Alcala Wood in a statement said “we cannot stand by and ignore excessive receivership fees that appear to have little-to-no relationship to the work that has actually been performed. We are optimistic that the court will conduct an extensive audit of the bills and compare it to the rehabilitation work performed before it approves a sale of the home.”

The city asked the judge to block the sale until the court can audit all the bills the company sent the Siegrists.

BARG submitted a response filing stating that even if the judge removes the $61,000 that the city believes BARG incorrectly charged in inflated hourly staff fees and by adding an unnecessary number of staffers to work on the case, the Siegrists will still lose ownership of the house unless they pay the remaining $187,000.

“For the first time since it sought to install me as receiver, and years after it has known of my actions and recommendations as previously approved by this court, the city now asks this court to ‘pause’ any sale of the property,” BARG wrote in a court filing. “But, other than belatedly attacking the receivership costs, the city offers no alternative solution to the proposed receiver’s sale.”

BARG’s statement in the court filing went on to accuse the city of changing its position on the property sale because of “political pressure.”

The filing suggests the city pay BARG’s bill, relieving the Siegrists, as it did for another Oak Park homeowner named Wanda Clark in 2021. The city has not said whether it will pay the Siegrists’ bill like it did for Clark, however.

“The city will await the court’s response to its motion before determining any potential next steps,” city spokesman Tim Swanson said.

Unlike Clark, the Siegrists own another house in the city, which is in East Sacramento. But the couple planned to pass that house down to their daughter, and it’s not yet ready to be occupied, Siegrist said.

There are no code violations at the East Sacramento house however, according to a city web page. BARG requested a title report on that house, according to a letter mailed to the couple in March. The couple worries that means there might be a way BARG could gain control of that house too. If the couple loses both houses, they say they could be on the streets.

“We would be homeless,” Bruce Siegrist, 69, said. “It’s ridiculous because there was nothing really wrong that could’ve been fixed in the beginning.”

BARG president Gerard Keena did not respond to an email seeking comment for this story.

City could keep using BARG

After the backlash from both cases, city officials have not submitted recommendations for judges to appoint BARG to take control of more Sacramento houses. But city officials have not promised they won’t do so in the future.

Seven months after three elected officials called for a review of receivers, that review still is not complete.

In October, about a week after the story published, Mayor Darrell Steinberg and council members Katie Valenzuela and Eric Guerra called for a city review and a city audit of BARG.

“This story raises serious questions about whether a process meant to safeguard neighborhoods is instead hurting vulnerable residents,” Steinberg said in a statement at the time. “It’s time for us to re-evaluate which receivers we will be recommending to the court.”

But the city did not launch an audit. And it did not formally launch the review until last month, when it sent out so-called “request for interest” forms to 212 receivership companies. The forms, due back to the city in June, ask the companies for their hourly fees and costs, among other qualifications.

Part of the reason for the delay was due to an effort to identify receivers who are more inclusive, Swanson said. The city routed the form through a Diversity Equity and Inclusion committee before sending it out.

Another reason for the delay was that the city needed to make sure it complied with a state law, Swanson said.

“One section of the law is particularly restrictive because it prohibits the city from directly or indirectly establishing an understanding or agreement with any receiver it intends to nominate on how the receiver will administer the receivership, if appointed, or how much it will charge for its services,” Swanson said in an email.

After a Berkeley man faced over $1 million in bills from BARG for his house, Berkeley started requiring all receivership appointments go to the council — a step Sacramento has not taken.

Rashid Sidqe, a community advocate who worked to try to help Clark, said the city should take that step, and should also immediately announce it will stop using BARG.

“After Wanda Clark, I think they should have denounced that receivership company,” Sidqe said. “And they should have asked for an outside evaluation of our receivership process. I look at it as elder abuse.”

Cities continue to use BARG

The city of Sacramento has not recommended BARG to the court as a receiver over any new homes since the October story. But other cities have continued to do so.

Earlier this month, judges appointed BARG to take over three houses in the Bay Area, according to the firm’s Facebook page — two in Fremont and one in Lafayette. In December, judges approved appointments of BARG as receivers for houses in Napa and Fremont, as well as Dunsmuir, in Siskiyou County, and Albany, in Alameda County. In February, a judge appointed BARG over a house in Mt. Shasta.

BARG’s leaders have also been speaking at statewide conferences to train staff at cities across the state on their practices. BARG attorney Ryan Griffith last month spoke at the League of Cities Leadership Summit for mayors, council members and city managers on how to resolve “drug houses,” according to the page. He also presented to the Alameda County Bar Association in February.