Eideard

Kimberlynn Collins says she cried when Ted Phillips appeared on her doorstep last summer and asked her whether she knew her house was going to be sold at auction because of delinquent property taxes. “I knew it was going to happen, but I didn’t think there was anything I could do about it,” said Collins, 49, of Detroit.

She said a divorce and layoff from her job as a massage therapy instructor put her into a financial tailspin that caused her to fall $5,500 behind in property taxes on her two-story home on Detroit’s west side.

But Phillips, executive director of United Community Housing Coalition in Detroit, was there to deliver hope, not doom.

Thanks to his nonprofit housing advocacy group, Collins and 149 other homeowners bought back their property at the Wayne County Treasurer’s tax auction in October, in most cases for a fraction of what they owed in back taxes.

The feat, accomplished for the modest sum of $194,000, got noticed by other groups.

Equal to the bill for a couple of Sarah Palin speeches.

“We have hundreds of millions of dollars being thrown at the foreclosure problem in Michigan with less than impressive results,” said Lisa Nuszkowski, outgoing director of the Michigan Foreclosure Task Force.

“This shows what kind of impact you can have with a small amount of money,” she added…

180 people trusted their fate to the coalition…

Phillips said his only regret is that the coalition lost the bid on 30 homes.

“It was heartbreaking,” he said, “but we just didn’t have enough money to save them.”

He said the group hopes to help even more homeowners at next year’s auction.

Bravo!

Perish the thought that government beancounters couldn’t have worked this out beforehand.

A fundraiser at a North Carolina middle school sold students 20 test points for a $20 donation.

That’s enough to raise a B to an A on two tests, or a failing score to a D.

Or at least it did until the News & Observer newspaper began asking questions, and the Wayne County school administrators ordered Goldsboro Middle School to stop the fundraiser.

They also issued this statement:

Yesterday afternoon, the district administration met with [Rosewood Middle School principal] Mrs. Shepherd and directed the following actions be taken: (1) the fundraiser will be immediately stopped; (2) no extra grade credit will be issued that may have resulted from donations; and (3) beginning November 12, all donations will be returned.

Susie Shepherd told the newspaper that a parent advisory council had come up with the idea and that she had endorsed it. She said the council is looking for a new way to raise money.

“Last year, they did chocolates, and it didn’t generate anything,” she says.

Here’s a school system with one administrator too many.

After federal border agents detained several Mexican immigrants in western New York in June, an article about the incident in a local newspaper drew an onslaught of vitriolic postings on its Web site. Some were racist. Others attacked farmers in the region, an apple-growing area east of Rochester, accusing them of harboring illegal workers. Still others made personal attacks about the reporter who wrote the article.

Most of the posts were made anonymously. But in reviewing the logs of its Internet server, the paper, The Wayne County Star in Wolcott, traced three of them to Internet protocol addresses at the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees border protection.

Homeland Security started an investigation into the posts this month, according to the reporter, Louise Hoffman-Broach, and Richard M. Healy, the Wayne County district attorney. A spokeswoman for the federal agency’s inspector general said she could neither confirm nor deny an investigation; department rules prohibit the use of office equipment for the personal transmission of material that could offend fellow employees or the public…

Local officials and residents say that beginning about 2006, federal officials stepped up their enforcement of immigration laws in western New York. Farmers and other residents said the push created a climate of fear in communities whose economies depend on migrant laborers, many of them illegal immigrants.

The Obama administration has moved to a less confrontational policy at work sites, focusing on employers. But Customs and Border Protection, which does not conduct work-site inspections, had not changed its strategy in New York, Mr. Price said.

The newspaper removed the posts. When they checked further, they found more racist and bigoted comments tied to previous articles coming from IP addressed belonging to DHS.

Nice to see the Department of Homeland Security living up to the standards of its founders.