Background
The Village of Downers Grove filed a petition in Du Page County circuit court seeking equitable relief over a residential property at 6610 Dunham Road that had been in disrepair since January 2022 and was deemed unfit for occupancy. The Village sought both demolition under section 11-31-1(a) of the Illinois Municipal Code and a declaration of abandonment under section 11-31-1(d), which would allow the Village to obtain a judicial deed transferring title to itself. The record owner, Jennifer Beckham, executed a statutory waiver of her rights to challenge the abandonment and was dismissed from the proceedings. The circuit court declared the property abandoned on January 8, 2025.
Following the abandonment declaration, the Village sent notice letters via certified mail to Beckham, mortgage servicer Lakeview Loan Servicing, LLC, and other interested parties, advising that title would transfer to the Village within 30 days absent contrary action. When the Village petitioned for issuance of a judicial deed, Lakeview objected, arguing the Village had not demonstrated proof of actual delivery of those notices. The circuit court initially denied the petition without prejudice, then granted the Village’s amended petition — which included an attorney affidavit attesting to certified-mail service — over Lakeview’s renewed objection.
Lakeview timely appealed, arguing the Illinois Municipal Code requires a municipality to prove that interested parties actually received notice as a precondition to obtaining a judicial deed. No transcript of the circuit court’s oral ruling was included in the appellate record.
The Court’s Holding
The Third District affirmed, holding that the plain language of section 11-31-1(d) of the Illinois Municipal Code imposes no actual-delivery or proof-of-receipt requirement on a municipality seeking a judicial deed following a declaration of abandonment. The statute requires only that notice be “sent in person or by certified or registered mail” to persons with a record interest in the property. Because the obligation is to send notice in the prescribed manner — not to prove its receipt — the Village satisfied the statute by mailing notices via certified mail and supporting that fact with counsel’s affidavit.
The court distinguished the two cases Lakeview relied upon. Deutsche Bank National Trust Co. v. Roongseang turned on a mortgage contract that itself conditioned effectiveness of notice on actual delivery when sent by means other than first-class mail — a contractual requirement absent from the Code. Jamison v. Montero, a non-precedential Rule 23 order, addressed the Attorneys Lien Act, which contains different notice language and does not govern municipal abandonment proceedings.
The court reinforced its reading through a structural comparison of section 11-31-1’s subsections: the legislature expressly required “return receipt requested” certified mail in subsection (d)’s expedited-hazardous-building provision, and required formal service of process at the abandonment-petition stage, but used no such limiting language for the post-abandonment judicial-deed notice. Under settled Illinois canon, the legislature’s deliberate omission of a delivery-confirmation requirement from the judicial-deed notice provision is presumed intentional, and a court may not read such a condition into the statute.
Key Takeaways
- Under 65 ILCS 5/11-31-1(d), a municipality’s obligation is to send post-abandonment notice by certified or registered mail; proof of actual receipt is not required before a court may issue a judicial deed.
- Courts will not import a delivery-confirmation requirement into a statutory notice scheme when the legislature expressly included that requirement in adjacent provisions but omitted it from the provision at issue.
- Contract-based notice cases (like mortgage acceleration notices requiring actual delivery) and lien-act cases are not controlling where the applicable statute uses materially different language.
- When a transcript of the circuit court’s ruling is absent from the appellate record, the reviewing court presumes the circuit court acted in conformity with the law under Foutch v. O’Bryant.
Why It Matters
This decision clarifies a practical procedural question that arises whenever a municipality invokes Illinois’s abandoned-property statute to acquire title: servicers and lienholders cannot defeat a judicial-deed petition simply by disputing whether they actually opened or received a certified-mail notice. So long as the municipality can demonstrate it sent notice in the manner the Code specifies — a showing readily made by attorney affidavit — the notice requirement is satisfied. That lowers the litigation burden on municipalities seeking to remediate blighted or dangerous properties.
For lenders and servicers with interests in Illinois properties subject to abandonment proceedings, the ruling is a reminder that certified-mail notice triggers the 30-day response window regardless of whether the notice was signed for or returned. Institutions must maintain current mailing addresses for properties in their portfolios and monitor abandonment petitions proactively rather than relying on a delivery-failure defense after the fact. Note that this decision is a non-precedential Rule 23 order and binding only in the limited circumstances permitted under Illinois Supreme Court Rule 23(e)(1).