(Bond Buyer) Thursday, July 15, 2010
WASHINGTON — California Attorney General Jerry Brown is suing mortgage titans Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as well as their regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, for effectively killing programs that allow the state’s localities to issue bonds to finance energy-efficient upgrades made by homeowners.
Brown, a Democratic gubernatorial candidate, filed the suit yesterday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, urging the court to issue an order restraining or enjoining the agencies from refusing to participate in these property assessed clean energy, or PACE, programs, which he insisted are permitted under state law.
The PACE programs were to receive about $150 million of seed money under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act enacted last year. But they generally skidded to a halt earlier this month after the FHFA directed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to tighten their underwriting standards for the PACE programs, warning they “pose significant safety and soundness concerns” and “disrupt a fragile housing finance market and long-standing lending priorities."
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CA Fhfa Suit
