The Tallahassee O is writing this article as an article retraction on a story that we previously released. The Story was about how Commissioner Andrew Gillum was able to pay off two mortgages in the amounts of $140,000 and $35,000 in total loans of $175,000.00 in March 2009? The Loans were shown to be satisfied after a 5-year period.
The information that we published with the loan documents was shown to be stated as true from Leon County Court’s On-line Record System. However, we don’t want to be part of any controversy for any misleading information to the public in which we were unaware of all the facts at the time of the story. We didn’t have the re-finance records available with the satisfied mortgage documents. The Loans were satisfied as stated in the earlier story. Instead of writing another story about new facts available, we decided to remove the previous story and do a retraction with a statement of the existing loan modification that was done. We recently learned that the loans were actually refinanced meaning that Gillum never really paid off the money itself. It was just changed to other mortgage contracts. Many people refinance loans for a lower rate in which there is no mystery or windfall of cash to Gillum to pay off the loans as people have stated.
The Tallahassee O always wants to correct any past errors and/or possible misleading information in our published stories on the website and up-date them as new information becomes available. When so many articles get published and/or republished from various sources, there’s always going to be an error rate for missing information and/or information that isn’t completely accurate shown on public records. The information that we had available at the time on the Leon County Court On-line Website for Mortgage Records was not seen for the re-financing. The Information given of the Mortgages being shown as satisfied was true, However there was refinancing done by Andrew Gillum on both of the loans that were previously satisfied for new loans.
July 16, 2012 at 8:24 AM
How about NOT PRINTING a story until your facts have been PROVEN? Even with a retraction, your printing of the story is still harmful.
July 16, 2012 at 11:37 AM
David — The information that was published was given to us and mentioned by several people. It was true based on what we knew in which two mortgages were satisfied, unfortunately the mortgage records weren’t easy to understand when we personally looked at them for review to understand that it was a re-finance of two new mortgages. There’s a new experience to everything and now we know what to look for in the refinancing situations with on-line records. We agree that we don’t want to print a story until facts are proven. It wasn’t a very clear situation based on public records at the courthouse website. A Retraction is about all we can do. It really wasn’t our story but provided by several sources. It seemed reasonable when we initially searched public records.