Summary of Sept. 26, 2018 General Tenants Meeting

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Come to our annual Trick or Treat for the Tenant Association table on Saturday, Oct. 27, 2018.  Rosa Delgado in Apt .2T will take candy contributions in advance.

Get your flu (and pneumonia and shingles) vaccines. If you have insurance, they’re generally free at the RiteAid, CVS, and Duane Reade.  If you lack insurance, ask our local Assembly Member Daniel O'Donnell's office if there will be free shots offered. 

STATE ELECTIONS

Six out of 8 members of the Independent Democrat Conference, which caucused with the Republicans in the State Senate, were defeated in the Sept. 13^th primaries. With them out of the way, actual Democratic control of the State Senate is possible, depending on November 6th elections. That will affect bills we can get passed when the rent laws are renewed in June 2019. Those bills include tenant costs for MCIs, and whether owners can continue to take vacant apartments out of rent stabilization.  If they couldn't they'd be less motivated to try to get stabilized tenants out, and there would be more stabilized apartments for younger people.  We'll have a meeting on this later. 

SUBMETERING MCI (Major Capital Improvement)

After 6 years, we lost our motion for reconsideration at the state's housing agency.  If we don't appeal, Stellar will bill the tenants of each rent stabilized apartment a one-time retroactive amount of $72.48 per room for 8 months, under the DHCR order. That comes to:

• $217.44 for a one-bedroom apartment
• $289.92 for a two-bedroom apartment
• $362.40 for a three-bedroom apartment.

Since no tenant can be billed more than a 6% increase for an MCI each year, your rent bill would temporarily go up by no more than 6% until that amount is fully paid, and then it would come off your rent bill.

BALCONY REPAIR

Stellar is hoping the rear balconies will all be completed by some time in November when cold weather halts the work. (Concrete doesn’t set well in cold weather.) Once the balconies are inspected, the scaffolding will be removed and in the Spring installed in front of the building. Tenants  must remove everything from the balconies being worked on.

TRASH TALK with the dynamic Jacquelyn Ottman.   

What’s the big deal?

$$$!! In 2018, $440 million of our tax dollars are being spent to pick up garbage and send it out of state for incineration or burial in a landfill. (Both are banned in NYC for poisoning our air and soil.)  

IF we recycle more, the city will make more money selling the recyclables and spend less on exporting it. We’ll have more money for other programs we want and need. So NYC is trying for no waste sent to landfills or incineration by 2030.  Quicker road repairs, anyone? More money for schools, parks, and more?

 

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The environment:  Decomposing food in landfills sends out methane gas that heats the climate. (Methane heats 25 times more than carbon dioxide.)

By recycling food waste, NYC can heat homes instead of the climate. 

But I’m so busy, and I just got home from work with a pizza and . . . .

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OK.  So here are some things you can do, even with your pizza box:

Scrape off the extra cheese, and put pizza boxes with other paper on the top shelf. (Throw out or keep that leftover slice and the soiled napkins in a container in the freezer till it can be composted. See below.)

Put rinsed metal, glass, sturdy plastic, and milk and juice cartons in the blue bin.  (“Rinsed” because we really don’t want to feed the roaches.)  Click here for the full list.

Please DON’T put your recyclables in a plastic bag: that will gum up the City’s recycling plant conveyor belts.

Sign a petition for Stellar to give us  compost bins (free from NYC) for food and food-soiled paper waste. The bins are critter-resistant.  And those plastic bags of food garbage will no longer bump their way down the compactor chutes, breaking up and leaving trails of food that have to be cleaned with chemicals periodically. 

Recycle electronics like old phones and faxes and computers in our building. (This already exists! Ask the super to put them in the bin.)

But who can remember the recycling rules?

grownyc.org

Our compactor rooms don’t meet legal requirements right now (the blue don’t hold 72 hours’ worth of trash). Let’s get what we need to keep our building cleaner and our tax dollars better spent.

If you’re motivated, in the meantime, put food waste into containers (or a bag) to keep in your freezer until you can bring it to the farmer’s market each Friday on W. 97^th St. or on Columbus Ave. near the Museum of Natural History on 79th St. on Sundays from 9-1.  Wouldn’t it be easier – and cleaner – to have a bin on each floor?!