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Milwaukee mediation clinic helps landlords, tenants resolve conflicts

By: Erika Strebel, [email protected]//August 4, 2017//

Milwaukee mediation clinic helps landlords, tenants resolve conflicts

By: Erika Strebel, [email protected]//August 4, 2017//

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Mediators Joanne Lipo Zovic, left, and Amy Koltz, right, stand with Presiding Court Commissioner Maria Dorsey on the fourth floor of the Milwaukee County Courthouse on July 26. Koltz and Lipo Zovic are the main mediators for the Landlord-Tenant Mediation Program that sets up shop in eviction court every Wednesday afternoon in Room 400 of the courthouse. Dorsey and her team of small-claims court commissioners refer first-cause-of-action cases to the pair. (Staff photo by Kevin Harnack)
Mediators Joanne Lipo Zovic, left, and Amy Koltz, right, stand with Presiding Court Commissioner Maria Dorsey on the fourth floor of the Milwaukee County Courthouse on July 26. Koltz and Lipo Zovic are the main mediators for the Landlord-Tenant Mediation Program that sets up shop in eviction court every Wednesday afternoon in Room 400 of the courthouse. Dorsey and her team of small-claims court commissioners refer first-cause-of-action cases to the pair. (Staff photo by Kevin Harnack)

Last year, there were about 13,000 eviction cases filed in Milwaukee County.

Five days a week, eviction court is held in the afternoons at the Milwaukee County Courthouse, and more than 100 cases are called each day. Parties can end up waiting for hours to get in front of a commissioner who has the power to decide if they will continue having a roof over their heads.

Now, a new clinic is aimed at speeding the whole system up in a way that advocates also hope will lead to better outcomes for participants.

For the past few months, the mediators Amy Koltz and Joanne Lipo Zovic have set up their Tenant-Landlord Mediation Program every Wednesday afternoon at the courthouse. Their primary mission is to resolve eviction cases that were referred to them by court commissioners, who handle all non-contested cases. Koltz and Lipo Zovic get about two to three cases each week.

This work comes in addition to the legal representation tenants can get through the Eviction Defense Project, which is run by Legal Action of Wisconsin. The main difference between the two programs is that Koltz and Lipo Zovic put the bulk of their efforts into resolving conflicts between tenants and landlords using mediation.

Presiding Court Commissioner Maria Dorsey usually sends the two lawyers cases involving either pro se litigants or families.

“It’s amazing how many do work out because they have time to be heard and have a neutral navigating them through,” said Dorsey.

The mediation clinic, based in the Milwaukee County Clerk of Courts’ office, specializes in first-cause-of-action evictions. This work often involves helping parties find a way to keep a tenant in an apartment or property. Should a tenant have to leave, the goal is to make that transition as little painful as possible to all parties.

“Whether that means the tenant gets more time to leave or the landlord gets some assurance of how things are going to go — it just hopefully leads to a better outcome,” said Lipo Zovic.

She and Koltz said that the work they do as mediators at the Tenant-Landlord Mediation Program differs in at least one big way from what their counterparts do at the Eviction Defense Project.

“We’re here to benefit both parties,” said Koltz, executive director of the mediation program.

Koltz and Lipo Zovic emphasized that they are committed to making the mediation clinic work for both tenants and landlords.

“We’re trying to balance the fact that there are interests on both sides that have to be satisfied,” said Lipo Zovic. “So this isn’t about ‘all landlords are bad’ — because they’re not.”

Both have been surprised to see that disputes that seemed hopeless could be resolved in mediation.

“Once they start to talk, they realize, ‘Oh, we could actually work this out,’” said Lipo Zovic, chief mediator at the clinic.

Koltz mediated a case in June involving a domestic-abuse victim with four children whose landlord had allowed her to go months without paying rent, to the point that the landlord was falling behind on his own bills.

The woman had explored the possibility of getting emergency rental assistance or staying in a shelter, all to no avail. If some sort of help didn’t come along soon, the likely outcome would have been homelessness, Koltz said.

Help eventually did come – in the form of mediation. The woman and her landlord reached an agreement that let her pay to stay for an additional month while she tried to figure her situation out.

“It wasn’t maybe the ideal of what each party wanted to see but, at the end of the session, they decided this was good for both of them and workable,” Koltz said.

The idea for the clinic was born about two years ago amid the commissioners’ search for something similar to a mediation program that now takes place during morning sessions in small-claims court. The commissioners were dissatisfied with the status quo in part because they were having to spend a lot of time explaining procedures to pro se litigants, who would often take it for granted that a payment plan would be worked out for them.

“The idea came from many areas,” said Dorsey. “As commissioners in small-claims court, we were frustrated because we found ourselves being a mediator in many ways.”

Various chief judges, along with Clerk of Circuit Court John Barrett and others, took part in turning the idea of a clinic into reality. Dorsey, Koltz and Lipo Zovic said the ball really got going thanks to the publication of the book “Evicted” by Matthew Desmond, a sociologist at Harvard University. “Evicted” tells the stories of four Milwaukee families and their struggles with eviction and has won a Pulitzer Prize and various other awards.

“I think it helped give us some collective energy to try and figure out ways to make some improvements,” said Lipo Zovic.

Koltz and Lipo Zovic say they have been able to handle the clinic’s workload by themselves. But that could easily change in the future.

That’s especially true if they are able to realize their goal of expanding their services. One new area they’d like to get into would be resolving tenant-landlord conflicts before eviction notices are even filed.

Mediating at that point would offer several advantages. For tenants, there would be no record appearing on the court system’s public website, CCAP, leaving a black mark on their rental history.

For landlords, there would be no money and time spent on filing  a court action.

Mediation would also benefit the court system.

“We would love it,” Dorsey said. “That would prevent more cases from being filed. A lot of landlords have attorneys, and the attorneys will sometimes do stipulations before court, but the eviction has already been filed. A lot of attorneys just file, and then they work the cases out.”

The long-term goal is to set up the clinic in a different neighborhood each day of the week, enlist the help of graduate students and even post some sort of announcement or notification alerting the public that mediation is an option before someone files an eviction.

For now, they are rolling out a clinic on the Near West Side, the origin of about 1,000 of the 13,000 eviction cases that were filed in the city last year.

“We have a lot of ideas of how to add to this, to make it deeper and give opportunities to teach other people because we are both very committed to alternative dispute resolution,” said Koltz.

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