Opinion ID: 1919301
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Return of the Escrow Fund to the Landlady

Text: Having decided (erroneously) that the District Court lacked jurisdiction to return the escrow fund to Tenant, the circuit court judge then had to dispose of the money. He turned first to § 8-211(m)(3) which (once a rent escrow action has been filed) permits the court to (3) Order that the amount of rent required by the lease, whether paid into court or to the landlord, be abated and reduced in an amount determined by the court to be fair and equitable to represent the existence of the conditions or defects found by the court to exist. Finding the existence of at least one statutory defect (no hot and cold running water), the judge was faced with a lack of evidence as to what fair rental value of the property might be, in light of that defect. The judge supplied this omission: And since this Court is a landlord and knows something about the cost of fixing up houses, and having fixed up three in the last two years, and knowing what the rents are in the area, I think she [Tenant] got, she paid exactly what she bargained for. And that is a place to live without running water. Because Tenant got exactly what she bargained for, there was no reason to abate the rent. That ended consideration of possible payment to Tenant. The judge thereupon ordered payment of the escrow fund to Landlady. Several months later, in his memorandum opinion, he explained that this decision was based on § 8-211(n)(6). In his rent abatement discussion, the judge improperly took judicial notice of rental values and other matters within his own personal knowledge, but not notorious or readily verifiable. Where adjudicative facts are involved, they may be judicially noticed if they are not subject to reasonable dispute and are generally known by persons of reasonable intelligence in the jurisdiction in which the court sits. 5 L. McLain, Maryland Practice: Maryland Evidence § 201.4 (1987) [footnote omitted]. And even matters not of common knowledge may be judicially noticed if they may readily be determined by examination of a source whose accuracy cannot be reasonably questioned, [such as] geographical and historical data [and] scientific facts which are generally accepted as irrefutable by living scientists.... Id. [footnotes omitted]. The cost of fixing up houses and rental values in Queen Anne's County do not fall within any of these categories. Furthermore, a trial judge's personal knowledge of an adjudicative fact does not make it the proper subject of judicial notice. Id. [footnote omitted]. But that is not important now, since rent abatement was not an issue at the de novo trial, and is not an issue here. Nobody had requested it, nobody had opposed it, and nobody had presented the necessary evidence on the subject. What is important is whether § 8-211(n)(6) supports the trial court's judgment. Paragraph (6) of subsection (n), it will be recalled, allows the court, after an appropriate hearing, to order that the moneys in the escrow account be disbursed to the landlord if the tenant does not regularly pay, into that account, the money owed. The judge found that the trial de novo was an appropriate hearing and we have no quarrel with that. Nor can we take exception to the finding that Tenant, since the District Court's order of 21 July 1986, had not paid rent money into the account. The account had been terminated as of that date; Tenant was not obliged to continue to pay rent into a nonexistent escrow account. Instead, as ordered, she continued to pay rent directly to Landlady until the tenancy ended. [7] Paragraph (6) is designed to provide relief to a landlord if a tenant fails to perform his or her obligation to pay rent into an established escrow account. It does not grant authority for returning the fund to a landlord whose tenant has in no way defaulted. For all the reasons we have stated, the judgment of the Circuit Court for Queen Anne's County must be reversed and the District Court judgment of 21 July 1986 reinstated. JUDGMENT OF THE CIRCUIT COURT FOR QUEEN ANNE'S COUNTY REVERSED. CASE REMANDED TO THAT COURT WITH DIRECTION TO ENTER JUDGMENT TERMINATING RENT ESCROW BY DISBURSEMENT OF THE ESCROW FUND AND ANY ACCRUED INTEREST TO PETITIONER. RESPONDENT TO PAY THE COSTS, INCLUDING COSTS IN THE CIRCUIT COURT FOR QUEEN ANNE'S COUNTY.