A Sarasota lawmaker filed a bill Tuesday to reduce the amount of time banks have to pursue a homeowner for unpaid mortgage debt from five years to one.

Rep. Greg Steube, an attorney who handles foreclosure prosecution and defense cases, said homeowners should be able move on with their lives without the worry that five years down the road the bank will come after them.

Florida law gives a lender five years to file for a deficiency judgment and up to 20 years to collect.

“If the bank wants to go after a deficiency judgment, there’s no reason it should take them more than a year,” said Steube, a Republican. “Are we waiting on the second tier of the foreclosure crisis to come three or four years from now.”

While the proposed deadline change in HB 1149 may be popular with homeowners, a fast-track foreclosure provision for abandoned or vacant homes will likely irk anyone worried about losing a home in a quickie court hearing.

The bill would require a home to first be deemed abandoned and then allow for an expedited foreclosure process already in Florida law. The “order to show cause” statute is rarely used because many attorneys interpret it to apply only to non-residential property and believe it bars a deficiency judgment, according to a recent Senate staff report.

Under Steube’s proposal, homeowners with homesteaded properties would also be allowed to request foreclosure mediation or a conciliation conference before a final judgment is entered. The Florida Supreme Court just ditched its mandatory foreclosure mediation program after it netted few settled cases.

Steube said his program is different in that homeowners have to request the meeting, rather than it being automatically required, and all documents must be submitted and received by the bank prior to the meeting.

“That way the bank can’t say they don’t have the documents they need,” Steube said. “At least all the documents have been exchanged and they can say you either qualify for a modification or you don’t.”

Steube said he tried to draft a bill that would cut down on the foreclosure backlog in the courts, but also be fair to both homeowners and banks.

His proposal joins a handful of other bills submitted for the 2012 legislative session that aim to reduce the judicial case load of more than 300,000 foreclosures in Florida, or fast-track the process.

Below, commentary by Sherry Lee:

Having worked tirelessly to help home owners through this mess for the last 4 years, I had this comment to make on The PB Post blog:

Sherry Lee Says:
December 29th, 2011 at 2:19 pm

This bill is a good idea and we need to support it. Banks have already done enough – with the help of the idiots in office – to crush the life out of people and the economy. The idea that these giant corporations can take taxpayer money and then use it to go after people for up to 20 years for a situation that they caused and then subsequently made billions of dollars from, in unconscionable. Pass this bill now!