In a few short months, Tammy Conroy lost her husband and her job and she learned that the bank was about to take her home in Hampton. She managed to move her furniture into storage before eviction, but in her haste, she forgot to empty the backyard shed.

Under an archaic state law, the town took possession of the stuff Conroy left behind and moved it to town hall for safe-keeping. Two months later, the basement at town hall resembles a thrift store. A washing machine rusts outside. Indoors, piles of photo albums, toys and bicycles gather dust.

As the number of evictions rise, municipalities are straining under the cost of meeting an 1895 law, written before an era of mass consumerism and three-car garages packed with stuff.

Cities, with more people, and especially renters, bear the brunt of moving and storage costs. But as the number of home foreclosures escalates, towns are starting to feel the pinch.

"We just have to put up with it, I guess," said Hampton First Selectman Maurice Bisson. "We're getting more and more now. People can't afford to pay their mortgage."

Connecticut may be the only state in the country in which municipalities dabble in the moving and storage business. The law was intended to help citizens in crisis reclaim their property by putting it in government hands rather than a hostile landlord or bank.

But municipalities say the law has outlived its usefulness. For three years in a row, Sen. Andrew McDonald, D-Stamford, has championed legislation to relieve towns and cities of the growing financial burden. This year, Gov. M. Jodi Rell has taken up the cause in a broad bill that would shift the responsibility to the state marshals, an idea backed by the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities.

The legislature's finance committee is scheduled to hold its first hearing on the matter today. "It's a landlord-tenant issue," said Ron Thomas, CCM's manager of state and federal relations. "It's not a business the towns should be in."

Anecdotal evidence suggests that evictions and "ejectments" — a legal term for when homeowners are thrown out in a foreclosure — are rising, in a tightening economy. Stamford has already handled more evictions and ejectments this fiscal year than last — with five months to go. New Britain, East Hartford and Bloomfield, to name a few, all report sharp increases.

Towns that may seldom deal with the eviction law are confronting an increase, a possible fallout from the mortgage crisis.

The big picture remains murky, because many municipalities don't differentiate between evictions and ejectments. But Bethany recently saw its first ejectment in more than two decades. West Hartford recently had three — after five years without one.

On the front lines are the state marshals who serve the legal papers and oversee the transfer of furniture from the home to the curb, where it becomes the municipality's responsibility.

"This is the busiest I've seen it in 16 years," Marshal Joe Nardini said recently, watching as movers boxed up a table in a West Haven home lost through foreclosure.

Some towns and most cities still use public works crews to move and store the stuff. East Haven uses its old high school for storage while New Britain and Windham use Quonset huts.

New Haven and Bridgeport have dedicated box trucks and crews to move two to three homes a day, hauling the property off to a city warehouse, at a cost of about $250,000 a year. Hartford spends $100,000; Stamford, $33,000, but social services recently had to request an extra $10,000 to handle the upswing. The practice has led to controversy in Hartford, where a grand jury investigating possible corruption at city hall has questioned city employees about fees paid to a political supporter of the mayor for hauling evicted tenants' property.

Municipalities recoup some of their costs if residents reclaim their possessions, after paying moving and storage fees. In Enfield, a woman who lost her house through foreclosure recently paid $1,200 to reclaim three TVs, a hutch full of crystal and other valuables.

If the property remains unclaimed after 15 days, towns are allowed to auction it off. Most of the time, though, it's junk, town officials say. At the recent ejectment in West Haven, unopened mail littered the living room floor.

The room was empty except for a doll stroller, a flip-flop and some family photos.

Bridgeport skips the auction and simply carts the abandoned items to the dump. Elsewhere, cities publish legal notices for auctions that few people attend.

Last week, Middletown scheduled an auction in Middlefield, at All American Moving & Storage. Just before the auction, a woman who had lost her home through foreclosure paid $480 to get her property back.

The city neglected to cancel the auction. Anyone who had read the legal notice and had shown up at the warehouse was out of luck.

New Britain takes a unique approach, widely publicizing its tag sale/auctions. Furniture is auctioned off while smaller items, like records or movies, are sold separately — boosting the odds that items may be reunited with their previous owner.

Only a small number of people who fall behind on their rent or mortgage actually get thrown out of their homes. Most make arrangements to move out, with their possessions, before eviction.

For the desperate who stay behind, the town's good intentions are not always apparent. Twice, homeowners have brandished guns at Haddam employees, public works Director Phil Goff said.

Like a growing number of municipalities, Haddam now delegates its moving and storage obligation to private movers. Out-sourcing has also minimized the painful encounters at town hall when children show up with their mother, crying, as Goff described it, for "Bugs Bunny to be released from house arrest."

West Hartford and Bloomfield are among the few towns that like the law. Ed Sanady, a neighborhood outreach coordinator in West Hartford, begs the legislature each year to keep the law because it notifies towns that a family is on the verge of homelessness, giving social workers a chance to help.

"We would save $10,000 to $15,000 without it," he said. "But from a human rights perspective it would be horrible."

"We send them letters, go out to the house and see what we can do to make their lives a little easier," said Camilla Jones, director of social services in Bloomfield.

The law alerted the first selectman in Hampton, a tiny town of woods and farms in the northeast corner of the state, that Conroy, a mother of three, was in trouble.

Last spring, Conroy's husband died, putting an end to the band-booking business they had run together.

As the bank moved to take their home, Bisson helped stall the foreclosure until after Christmas. Later, he helped lug Conroy's belongings into storage. He found her an apartment in town, allowing her kids to stay in the same school.

If he can do it legally, Bisson wants to hold a tag sale at town hall to give Conroy a chance to reclaim the contents of her shed.

"I'm just hoping I can help her out a little more," he said.