The Bartholomew County Sheriff’s Department is contracting out sheriff sales to an Indianapolis company.
Effective this month, all Bartholomew County sheriff’s sales will be processed by SRI, Inc. — a tax sale and mortgage foreclosure facilitator operating in seven states, including Indiana.
The most significant benefit of hiring SRI is that it will free up more time for Adolfo “Rudy” Olivo, said sheriff’s Capt. Brandon Slate.
Up until this month, those sales required about 25 hours of Olivo’s time a week, which Slate said is too much time away from Olivo’s main responsibility as Bartholomew County Sheriff’s Department sex offender registrar.
“It’s time Rudy really should spend focusing on monitoring the sex offenders in the county,” Slate told the Bartholomew County commissioners last week.
The registry allows residents to enter any local address online at the sheriff’s website. It will then provide a list of all registered sex offenders living within a one-mile radius, according to the website.
Designed to increase community safety and awareness, the registry can also provide residents with information about a particular sex offender living within the county, the website states.
In Indiana, a sheriff sale is the result of a court-ordered bank foreclosure for the non-payment of a standard monthly mortgage.
While the county takes $200 from each sale, SRI will receive roughly half of that amount for essentially handling the program from beginning to end, Slate told the Bartholomew County commissioners.
In response, commissioner Larry Kleinhenz asked why SRI’s fee couldn’t be tacked on to the bidder’s bill, so the county doesn’t lose half of its money.
In response, Slate said a $200 cap per sale has legally been in place for the past five years.
In 2018, Bartholomew County spent about $17,000 to manage about 121 sheriff sales that included regular and overtime pay for deputies to carry out the sales, Slate said. If SRI had handled all of those sales last year, Slate estimates the cost would have been about $12,100.
While there is normally a sheriff’s sale once a month, the number of properties sold at each sale can show significant fluctuation, Slate said.
“There are months when we have very little, and others where we can have up to 15 to 20,” Slate said.
