As the filing deadline for legislation approached yesterday, state lawmakers were rushing to finalize drafts of nearly a dozen bills designed to lessen the damage inflicted by home foreclosures in Rhode Island and increase protections for the properties’ tenants.

The effort mirrors similar ones in states around the country where fallout from years of reckless lending and a deepening economic recession have left neighborhoods ravaged by foreclosures.

Ohio and California have enacted laws to hold lenders responsible for maintaining foreclosed properties, and similar bills are pending in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut and Pennsylvania, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures in Washington.

In Rhode Island, the Foreclosed Property Upkeep Act, a version of which was vetoed last year by Governor Carcieri, is back again. Another bill would create an 180-day moratorium on foreclosures. Several other bills require that tenants get more notice and more time prior to being ordered to move out. And one bill would make it illegal to evict tenants of a foreclosed property without “just cause,” an approach which has its roots in the national tenants’ rights movement dating to the Great Depression.

“What’s promising is there’s anecdotal evidence that the state and local efforts are mitigating the harm that’s being caused by foreclosures,” said Diane M. Standaert, legislative counsel for the Center for Responsible Lending, a nonprofit group in North Carolina.

Opponents of the bills say that efforts to forestall foreclosures or require banks and mortgage companies to keep tenants on after a foreclosure may only serve to drag out the process and delay the industry’s recovery.

“I’m representing an industry that’s still hurting … and we’re sitting here having to clean up the mess,” said William A. Farrell, general counsel and legislative counsel for the Rhode Island Bankers Association. “All of this legislation impacts us because we’re going to be here tomorrow. These 1,000 or 2,000 mortgage companies (that made the bad loans), they’re gone. … Adding all of these little bits to it isn’t going to make it any easier.”

In vetoing last year’s bill to require lenders to maintain foreclosed properties, Governor Carcieri objected to lenders being required to post a bond in the amount of 25 percent of the property’s assessed value to cover the cost of repairs.

“I believe it is unfair to require an owner to post a bond,” the governor wrote in his veto message, “simply because the potential exists for ‘neglecting’ the foreclosed property.”

Rhode Island’s foreclosure rate last year was the 11th-highest in the nation, according to RealtyTrac, a research firm.

The number of first mortgages entering foreclosure during the fourth-quarter of last year climbed to 2,212 –– more than double the 1,031 during the same period in 2007, according to Moody’s Economy.com.

Lenders who want to unload foreclosed properties try to get the tenants out because, they say, it makes the properties more attractive to buyers. In District Court, Providence, last year, judges issued 2,180 eviction orders for properties in foreclosure –– an average of six per day, according to court data.

Sen. Juan M. Pichardo, D-Providence, who yesterday was completing drafts of three foreclosure-related bills, said he was extremely disappointed with the outcome of last year’s legislative efforts on the foreclosure issue and hopes to do better this session.

“I’m pushing harder for the governor to pay attention to this,” Pichardo said, “because we need this type of stability in the neighborhoods. If we don’t have stability in the homes, there’s not going to be money to spend” to jump-start the economy.

Pichardo plans to introduce a bill that would prohibit evicting tenants from foreclosed properties except for “just cause,” such as non-payment of rent or failure to comply with their lease. Among the exceptions is when the property must be vacated as a condition of the sales agreement.

New Jersey enacted its own Eviction for Just Cause law in 1975, though the seeds of such laws were planted during the Great Depression. In one case in 1920, a judge in Brooklyn ruled that a tenant named Joseph Reines could not be evicted from his apartment simply because the building had been foreclosed.

“The legislature is not dealing with an invasion of tramps,” The New York Times quoted the judge as saying. “What city, even our own New York City, however law-abiding, can maintain its peace, health and order against the consequences of the eviction of perhaps thousands of its law-abiding citizens, so that they may become outcasts with no places to lay their heads?”

larditi@projo.com