All this makes sense. Good government at work.
With the following caveat.
The dead guy has two sisters. They have zero interest in the house. They never opened up a probate estate and never sought to get any of their brother's assets. The County asks them if they care at all about what happens to the house. The sisters say "No." It was their brothers'. He's dead. Deal with it however you'd like. Burn it down, for all they care.
After evicting everyone and cleaning out the trash, the receiver then rehabilitates the house, finds a buyer, sells it, and uses the proceeds to off the mortgage as well as the costs incurred by the County. But those funds weren't sufficient to fully pay the receiver's own fees.
So the receiver then asks the court to make the sisters pay his fees.
The sisters hire a lawyer, who essentially says "Hey, we didn't do anything here. It's not our house, we never wanted it, we never filed anything, and we shouldn't have to pay fees for something of which we had utterly no part." The sisters are also miffed because the receiver could have gotten a super-priority lien to make sure the receiver's own fees got paid first, but inexplicably failed to do so.
The trial court agreed, and didn't hold the sisters responsible. But when the sisters then moved to recover their fees, the trial court refused, holding that they were not recoverable.
The Court of Appeal reverses, holding that they were.
There's no way anyone should have gone after the sisters in the first place. They weren't responsible. It wasn't their house, they didn't want it, and they shouldn't be liable for something just because they're the closest relatives to someone who dies intestate. Just like someone who dies with a credit card debt, that's exclusively the dead person's problem, not the relatives'. (At least if the relatives, as here, don't want any benefit from the estate.)
I'm happy the sisters got their fees. Both in the trial court and on appeal.
