PUTNAM TENANT COALITION

Hon. Jaclyn A. Brilling Secretary to the Commission State Public Service Commission Agency Building 3 Albany, NY 12223-1350

Re: Petition for rehearing of #08-E-0836, #08-E-0837, #08-E-0838, #08-E-0839 w 0 Dear Secretary Brilling:

We the undersigned are the Presidents of the tenant associations for Schomburg Plaza (a.k.a. Frawley Plaza #08-E-0836), River Crossing (a.k.a. Metro North #08-E-0837), Roosevelt Landings, (a.k.a. North Town Roosevelt #08-E-0838), and Upaca 1 and 2 (a.k.a. KNW Apartments, #08-E-0839). We write in support of the order staying permission to Urban America to submeter our buildings and urge the Public Service Commission to permanently stay the permission to submeter and to withdraw its approval to allow submetering in our buildings.

We represent 2769 families living in four formerly subsidized buildings. Many of the families in our buildings are low income and/or elderly and/or disabled. Many families are on fixed incomes and are already struggling to pay their rents, even with the federally subsidized vouchers. We understand that we will get a rent reduction if you lift the stay and submetering goes into effect. However, after receiving the shadow bills (and only three buildings received the bills), the reductions do not come close to covering the increased costs of living in our homes with submetering.

Our buildings were inadequately constructed in the 1970's and have not been well maintained since. Our heat comes from electric baseboard heaters. We cannot set our thermostats because most are broken, their aged elements no longer function. . We can turn our heaters on or turn them off but they will not adjust to a setting on their own. They were not designed with temperature controls and were an inadequate tool to regulate heat even when they were working. Our tenants complain of insufficient insulation, leaky windows, and energy inefficient appliances. While we believe that energy efficiency is a laudable goal, we have not been given the tools to conserve energy. As tenants we have done what we can to conserve energy. We have changed the lightbulbs, and turned off appliances and some of us have gone without heat. As we are tenants, we cannot make changes in our apartments that would give us the tools to be more efficient. With submetering, we would be faced with choosing to be cold in the winter and hot in the summer or becoming homeless. If you lift the stay, please require that our landlord either renovates our buildings to become energy efficient or reduces our rent to cover the costs of utilities in energy inefficient apartments with electric heat.

Further, our landlord's plan to submeter the buildings would result in losing valuable consumer protections. We understand that the New York State legislature enacted the Home Energy Fair Practices Act (HEFPA) to protect residential gas and electric customers. HEFPA protects tenants by requiring that utilities have specific procedures for investigating customer complaints. While a dispute is pending, the utility cannot terminate service as long as the customer pays the undisputed portion of the utility bill. The procedure that our landlord proposed in their application bares no resemblance to the HEFPA protections. The complaint procedures contained in the orders provide that the tenant can file a complaint in landlord tenant court. However, the landlord tenant court in has no jurisdiction to hear complaints about submetered electricity. Housing court hears eviction cases. Our landlord's application, indeed, contemplates that after a tenant complains about the utility charges, the landlord's attorney would file a case in housing court. In housing court, the only cases that a landlord can file are eviction cases.

Indeed it is not surprising that our landlord proposed filing eviction cases in response to tenant complaints. After all, our amended leases, the applications to submeter and the orders permitting submetering, make clear that failure to pay utility costs on time will lead to eviction. Although HEFPA provides specific protections for low income tenants and elderly and disabled tenants who have fallen behind in paying utility cost, unlike other residential gas and electric customers, our landlords submetering plan denies us the protection of the law. The original orders approving submetering state that in no event will electric service be terminated for non- payment of electric charges. The only other response to non-payment of electric charges is eviction.

Our landlord has followed the advice of NYSERDA which advises landlords to avoid complying with tenant protection laws by treating the utility charges as added rent and evicting tenants for nonpayment. According to NYSERDA, notice and payout requirements and protections for the elderly and disabled ... are time consuming, burdensome to the owner and inconsistent with continuation of the rent tenancy... As a result owners may want to consider legal action for eviction of the resident ... as the primary enforcement mechanism for nonpayment of submetered electric charges." (NYSERDA Residential Electrical Submetering Manual, Revised October 2001. http://www.submeteronline.com/pdf/subman200l.pdf, page 30). We recently attended a meeting where our landlord's attorney acknowledged this plan and explained that "evicting tenants makes economic sense". The legislature enacted HEFPA to provide protections to elderly and disabled tenants. If landlords believe that those protections are time consuming and burdensome, they should take their concerns to the legislature. We do not believe that a state commission can overrule a law that was passed by the legislature and signed by the Governor.

Our leases now allow our landlord to avoid complying with HEFPA because utility costs are considered added rent. The leases state that charges that tenants are required to pay under the lease are deemed "added rent". This "added rent" will be billed and is a payable as rent, together with the next monthly rent due. If the tenant fails to pay the added rent on time, the landlord will have the same rights against tenant as if the tenant failed to pay rent. Utility costs are "added rent" under our leases. Our leases state that if the rent or added rent is not paid on time, the landlord may take any of the following steps including using eviction or other lawsuit methods to take back our apartments.

Additionally, an unintended consequence of our landlord's plan is that the low income tenants living in our buildings will be denied the emergency Home Energy Assistance Program (HEAP) assistance since we will never receive termination notices for non payment of utilities. Unlike other low-income New Yorkers, we have lost the protection of this program. We do not believe that the Public Service Commission intended to deny us the assistance of programs created to assist low income tenants.

Further, the Public Service Commission has an obligation to comply with the State Environmental Quality Review Act. This obligation includes but is not limited to the requirement that the Commission determine whether granting our landlord's application may have a significant effect on the environment. We believe that the granting of this application would have a significant effect on the environment by leading to the evictions of hundreds of low-income tenants.

Lastly, we hope that during this process of reconsideration, we will have access to more information about the plans for our buildings. For example, three of the four buildings received shadow bills for the month of February. Two of those buildings were scheduled to be submetered in the middle of February and the third in the beginning of March. We did not receive the number of months of shadow billing required by your order and many of our tenants received no shadow bills at all. Additionally, we understand that the orders required that we not be billed more than we would pay if we were direct metered customers of Con Edison. We would like to know what we would pay if Con Ed had provided our electricity. We would also like to know what the landlord paid previously for electricity as they may not charge us more and thereby profit from submetering the building. We would like to know what improvements to our apartments are planned by our landlords and how those improvements would affect our bills. Most important, we believe that our landlord should be required to certify that the buildings are energy efficient prior to any permission for submetering and that the submeters have been safely and correctly installed, calibrated, and are providing an accurate account of each apartment's use.

We appreciate the opportunity to comment on the petition for rehearing. Submetering would be detrimental to the health, safety and general welfare of the tenants living in these buildings, many of whom are low income, elderly and/or disabled. Please withdraw your approval of Urban America's submetering petitions and permanently stay submetering in our buildings. If you decide to approve submetering, please first require that our landlords renovate our apartments so that they will be energy efficient, attest to the correctness of their submeters, and provide evidence that we are not being overcharged for electricity.

Sincerely,

"River Crossing" (formerly Metro North) Tenants Association

"The Heritage' (formerly Schomburg Plaza) Tenants Association IC) ci "The Miles, and "The Parker" (formerly Upaca 1 and 2) Tenants Association

ticJ Landings ' formerly stwood) Residents' Association

CC: US Senator Charles Schumer, Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, Congressman , Senator Bill Perkins, Senator Jose Serrano, Assemblyman , Assemblyman Adam Clayton Powell IV, Assemblyman Keith Wright, Councilwoman Inez Dickens, Councilman Robert Jackson, Councilwoman Jessica Lappin, Councilwoman Melissa Mark- Viverito, NYS Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, NYC Comptroller William Thompson, Merilyn Rovira and Ray Adkins, Fannie Mae