Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
Thanks to all of our neighbors and to you John Marsh and the Tenants Association for your advocacy on this and all the issues affecting our community in Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town. We have a lot of questions about the implications of last week’s decision so we want to get right into it. Before we start I just want to disclose that I am myself a market rate tenant of Peter Cooper Village and like many of you listening today I am part of the potential class that could be affected by this decision. We have already gotten many questions, thank you to those of you who already submitted them via email. Questions that range from lease renewals to calculating rents, who is a member in the class and other subjects. We have consolidated the questions that we have already received and we hope to make it through as many questions as possible in one hour. We are joined today by Alex Schmidt, a partner at Wolf Haldenstein, who argued the Roberts versus Tishman Speyer case before the Court of Appeals. We are also joined by Jimmy Yan, Counsel to [Manhattan] Borough President Scott Stringer. This call is also co-sponsored by our Assemblyman Brian Kavanagh, State Senator Tom Dwayne and Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney. So thanks to everyone for joining us. Lets get right on into the questions and we are going to try to keep this moving so lets start with the big picture and Alex, tell us exactly what the Court of Appeals did last week. What did they decide?

Alexander Schmidt:
Hello everybody, the Court of Appeals last week in a 4-2 decision ruled that Tishman Speyer and its predecessor MetLife improperly deregulated apartments because they were contemporaneously receiving J51 tax abatements from the city.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
Okay so is this the end of the line here? Can Tishman Speyer appeal this decision?

Alexander Schmidt:
Tishman Speyer can not appeal this decision. This was a matter of state law, purely of state law and there is no further appeal or recourse to the United States Supreme Court from the Court of Appeals decision.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
So what happens now?

Alexander Schmidt:
Well what happens now is a technical matter. The case is remitted or remanded or returned to the lowest court, the trial court, the State Supreme Court, and its going back before the judge who originally dismissed the case, which doesn’t mean that that’s a bad thing. The lower court will in the initial instance resolve the immediately pressing issues that we have in connection with the case and the immediate pressing issues are, one, we are going to require answers to the complaint from MetLife and Tishman Speyer. Two, we have to resolve issues pertaining to the escrows that as many of you know have been funded by what we call the rent differentials between the legal regulated rents and market rate rents of the 4,400 apartments at issue. And the other thing that we have to deal with is the issue that the Court of Appeals declined to rule upon, which has to do with the issue with retroactivity. And that was not an unsurprising decision by the Court of Appeals to not reach that question because that question had not been decided by the lower courts had not been previously ruled upon by the lower courts and it is very common for the Court of Appeals as a procedural matter not to reach questions that the lower courts have not already ruled upon.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
Okay so we are going to get into those questions in a little more depth and we will try to make it real easy for people to understand the implications of escrows and retroactivity and all that stuff.

Let’s start with the escrow issue. This is a question from one of our e-mailers who says that they understand that the Appellate Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in March and that the additional rents or excess rents were deposited into an interest-bearing escrow account starting on April 1. So help us understand Alex what is the status of that account? Does this decision mean that those monies are going to be refunded regardless of any of those other issues about retroactivity and things, or are these deposits subject to a further court action here?

Alexander Schmidt:
The answer to the first part of that question is that the monies have been put into an escrow account, an interest bearing escrow account since April 1. We have been monitoring that account periodically and we are confident that the monies have indeed been put in, when they were required to be put in the amounts that were required to be put in.

Our position with respect to the escrow on behalf of the tenants is that we have a court order in place that is dated March 13, the week after the Appellant Division ruled in the tenants’ favor, that compels Tishman to negotiate an agreement with us that ultimately will be reduced to a court order that provides for the escrowed funds to be returned. However, there is the possibility that the issue that the court did not decide considering retroactivity may impact, at least from Tishman’s perspective, this escrow agreement and order that is already in place. We are hopeful that we are going to try to talk to Tishman if they want to talk to us about this to try to resolve it without the need to litigate over it. But again our position is and I think that the Court of Appeals ruling is clear on this that the rents that have been paid above the rent stabilized levels are illegal rents and therefore that the monies in the escrow account are rents that should be returned to the tenants as soon as possible. Although, as I said, there maybe some practical impediments to that given Tishman’s current position.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:

Okay, so let us understand this for a second, let me first note that our Assemblyman Brian Kavanagh has joined us, thank you Brian for being here and for your work on this issue, and I think there were a couple of questions coming for you in a moment. So what was put into escrow was the difference between the legal rent stabilized rent and what people were actually paying, is that correct?

Alexander Schmidt:
That is correct.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:

Ok, so one of our questioners wants to know how that escrow figure would be calculated, how does that get sorted out and do you have that information in your possession with respect to each individual apartment and how do we insure that the landlord was complying with whatever calculation was suggested or agreed to?

Alexander Schmidt:
What we did with the landlord back in March was arrive at a mutually agreeable formula for calculating the difference between the legal stabilized rent and the market rent for each of the apartments. And again we call that difference the rate differential; it’s also been referred to as excessive rents. It’s the amount that is put into the escrow, which I will refer to as the rent differential. Now to calculate that there is a formula that is derivable from the rules and regulations governing rents stabilized rents, and we were able to agree on all the components of that formula for each of the apartments. However, what we were not able to do, because we didn’t have time to do it, we were not able to verify that Tishman’s calculations with respect to every factor or variable within that long extended formula were indeed true and accurate numbers. We were able to satisfy ourselves, however, that Tishman did what it was supposed to do, which was calculate those numbers in good faith. We reserve all the tenants’ rights to challenge Tishman’s calculations in the future. And what has to happen now with respect to the escrow is that we have to go back to the formula for each apartment and instead of just making good faith approximations for the seven or eight different variables that go into the formula we need to verify the precise numbers and we think for most of the apartments the amounts that are being put into escrow are reasonably within what will ultimately prove to be the precise figure. There may be some escrowed amounts that are a little higher than they should have been, there may be some that are a little lower than they should have been. But by-in-large each of the market rent tenants has been putting roughly the right amount into escrow every month.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
Ok, now we have a question here from somebody who wants to know if that escrow went in for all of the 4,400 market rate apartments or if it was just for the seven named plaintiffs, I think you can handle that question pretty easily.

Alexander Schmidt:
Yes, for every affected apartment so it’s all 4,400 apartments and as I said we have checked from time to time by getting updates from the escrow agent who is maintaining the escrow account to insure that the funds are continuing to be put in on a monthly basis. Now if each of the tenants has paid their rent on time and in full then they should have in their escrow account an amount equal to the rent differential for each of the last several months. If rents have not been paid in full then there are adjustments that will need to be made later.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:

Ok so lets just put a little meat on the bones here as to what this actually means for people because we are getting questions from folks who say, OK, well I want to understand how you figure out what the legal rent stabilized rent should be, is it figured out by each apartment? Is it done by the year that it was deregulated, what’s the potential range that we are talking about here? Let me just give you and this is so that our listeners know it is not a scenario that we have actually talked about yet, but let’s just talk about the rents in Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, the rents go from $2500 to $5000, so lets say you have a $3500 a month rental and somebody is saying to themselves, well, jeez, I don’t really know what this means for me, they look at their rent history and they see that it was deregulated back in say 2001 or 2002; they are allowed an adjustment when it becomes vacant to increase the rent, every year that passes under the rent stabilization laws you are allowed to increase the rent by a certain amount, it seems like it is possible that apartment could legally be rented for $2700, $2800, $2900, is that possible? What would be the factors here in figuring out what the difference is between what is legal and legitimate and what people are paying?

Alexander Schmidt:
To answer to that question I have to run through the entire formula in the hypothetical apartment. So let me try to do that and I hope I’ll do it slowly enough and with enough clarity so that everyone understands. Let’s think hypothetically that we have this $3500 a month market rate apartment, what we will do and what has been done again on a rough approximated basis for each apartment is Tishman will go back to its records, which we can verify by looking at the DHCR records for the apartment, to determine when that particular apartment was deregulated. If it was deregulated in 2000 or 2002 it will have that information and the last rent stabilized rent before the deregulation will be the starting point for the calculation. So let’s say for purposes of this hypothetical apartment that the rent was $1000 a month in the year 2000, it was deregulated in 2001, then what we will do after finding out that the last stabilized rent was $1000 we will make all the adjustments that Council Member Daniel Garodnick mentioned. The first adjustment will be what is know as the vacancy adjustment. Every rent stabilized apartment that becomes vacant is allowed to be increased in terms of its rent by approximately 18 to 20 percent depending on the circumstances initially, so as soon as it becomes vacant the landlord can increase the rent for that apartment by 20%. So the rent will go immediately from $1000 a month to $1200 a month. If the apartment had been occupied by a single tenant for more than eight consecutive years there is also something know as the long-term vacancy adjustment and that is a .6% annual increase for every year beyond 8 years. So just hypothetically if the previous tenant had been in the apartment for 18 years then in addition to the 20% bump or increase for vacancy there will be 10 years at a .6% increase so that will be an additional 6% that could be added. A lot of the apartments that were vacated at Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village were vacated by long-term tenants, so a lot of the apartments have this additional long term vacancy increase worked into the formula. But to make it easy for ourselves we will not assume that this hypothetical apartment has a long-term vacancy increase. So we still have the $1200 monthly rental as of 2001. The next adjustment, and this has happened probably in the vast majority if not all of the cases when apartments are vacated at the two properties, the landlord can go back to the apartment and make individual apartment improvements, upgrades, for example new kitchens, new appliances, new bathrooms, painting the walls. Under city rules the landlord is allowed to increase the rent for such an apartment by 1/40th of the improvements. So in other words, over 40 months the landlord is repaid for all those improvements. So in our hypothetical case if the landlord went and improved the apartment by putting in $40,000 of improvements, that landlord would be allowed to raise the rent legally by an additional $1000. So now our vacated apartment has a rent in 2001, after the improvements are made of the $1200 plus and additional $1000, so that apartment is now rented or rentable in 2001 at the rate of $2200. Now every year, assuming a new tenant comes in and renews on a yearly basis, the Rent Guidelines Board allows the landlord to increase rent stabilized rents by a fixed percentage and some years in the past it has been 2.5% a year, some years it has been 4.5%, some years 3%. So just assuming hypothetically that this apartment was renewed every year between 2001 and the current year, or eight times, there would be a combination of those annual increases that have to be figured into the calculations. Let’s say that the combination of the eight annual increases is another 20% so that with our $2200 apartment, another $440 will be added to that, so $2640 will be the legal rent for that apartment and in our calculation we call that the base stabilized rent. And that’s the rent that exists today that would be legal under the rent stabilization laws and to the extent that the $3500 apartment is paying more than that or approximately $1050 a month, that $1050 a month would be put into escrow.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
Ok, so the difference between the $3500 and $2640 is what you are saying.

Alexander Schmidt:
$2640.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
Ok so it’s about approximately $900.

Alexander Schmidt:
Approximately $900 and change. Correct.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
Got it, so, and of course what was done was rather than make the apartments increase at the rent stabilized level Tishman Speyer and its predecessor MetLife moved those apartments from $2600 to $3300, $3400, $3500 so that’s the difference we are talking about. For people it would vary between apartments, is that right?

Alexander Schmidt:
That is correct. This formula would differ from one apartment to another depending on how many times the apartment was vacated and re-let, as well as the nature and the amount of improvements put into the apartment and when the apartment was first deregulated. Some apartments were not deregulated until 2006 for example.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
Now how does somebody get the information about what their last legal rent is, I am going to pose this one to Assemblyman Kavanagh.

Assembly Member Brian Kavanagh

Basically the DHCR maintains these records and I know there are some, during the course of the litigation Alex you folks have also been receiving and providing information.

Alexander Schmidt:

Yes we received a lot of that information from the tenants themselves who have responded to the request on the website to send it to us.

Assembly Member Brian Kavanagh
So you can request a rent history for your apartment from DHCR and that should, again I don’t know whether, since I joined the conversation late here, I don’t know whether we are recommending that, folks can obviously begin to make these calculation for themselves so that they can understand their situation. I am assuming we are still suggesting to the tenants that they not actually apply for a change in their circumstances, is that correct?

Alexander Schmidt:
That’s correct. Another thing that any of you can do is if you want to know what the precise rent differential for your apartment has been you can contact one of my colleagues here by calling or emailing Michael Liskow or Jeremy Doster. They have information and if you give them your apartment address, be it your current address if you still live there or your former address, and you can verify for us for security purposes what your current rent is, we will tell you what your rent differential for your apartment is. And we have done that for quite a number people who contacted us in the past. And we are recommending that people do not, well, people can go to the DHCR to get this information, the old rental information, by contacting the DHCR Gertz Plaza in Queens, I don’t have the number handy.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:

Yes the DHCR number is 718-739-6400.

Alexander Schmidt:
And if you want to email my colleagues, I will give you two email addresses, one is .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) and the other one is .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). If you email either of those gentleman and you give us the information that we need to verify that you are indeed the tenant or the ex-tenant at the apartment then we can disclose to you individually what your rent differential is.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
Ok, so now there are a lot of question about rent stabilization, those 4,400 apartments which were deregulated now are rent stabilized apartments according to the law today. Is that correct?

Alexander Schmidt:
That is certainly our view of the Court of Appeals’ decision.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
Ok, so now we have a lot of tenants who are newly rent stabilized tenants so Assemblyman, besides the limits on rent increases that we heard about, what benefits are there? What benefits will there be to people for rent stabilization, like automatic renewals, subletting, any restrictions that we should know about? Can you address that?

Assembly Member Brian Kavanagh
It’s a fairly sort of broad range of law and I am not going to try to summarize all aspects of it, but basically the rent stabilization code is intended to protect your right to rent your apartment at an affordable rate and protect a range of services and rights that the state has decided you ought to have as a tenant. The biggest one as Council Member Garodnick mentioned is that you do have a right to a renewal of your lease so in addition to setting the rent that they are allowed to charge they also allow you stay in the apartment over the long term, assuming you could pay the legal rent set by this system. In addition the system provides for succession rights so in most circumstances if you are a relative of someone who is living in an apartment that is rent stabilized you can assume the lease of that person. There are some rules about how that works. Generally if you are not a senior citizen would have had to been living there for two years. If you are over 62 years old I believe it’s a single year and again you do have to be a relative of the tenant for that to be automatic, or a member of the family. There are some finer points in that and if you do have specific questions about whether succession applies you should probably contact either an attorney or our offices or the Tenants Association. Another big area is that you do have a right to maintain the level of services that you had in the past and obviously in the case of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village this could become a significant issue because obviously a lot of people in the community have been concerned about what might happen in the event that Tishman Speyer’s financial troubles cause some restructuring in the way the property is held. Rent stabilization ought to protect tenants and the services they get and DHCR ought to be a position in help enforce that so that basic services are available. So that is just another way people receive protection, and the details of that would have to be worked out. Beyond that, I think those are the major areas. I do know that there are a lot of questions but again if you have specific questions, if you are new and you don’t know how this applies to you, you certainly should reach out to our offices or to the Tenants Association.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
Brian, let me ask you one more question here about rent stabilization since this is a considerable number of people who have just been added to that group, there would be that more concern about the existence of the rent stabilization laws and they come up for renewal in 2011 and while we are on the subject if you could just address what you think the chances are of the renewal of rent stabilization and what needs to happen to make that be successful?
Assembly Member Brian Kavanagh

I would be happy to. Rent stabilization was originally set in place as a theoretically temporary measure and had to been renewed every few years. It is currently slated to expire in 2011. It has been slated to expire before and it has been renewed. We have had some form of regulation in New York for about 60 years now and I think there is a reasonable expectation that it would be renewed in 2011. The question is always what exactly is going to get renewed, each time it has come up for renewal in the past there have been efforts that landlords and other have engaged in to weaken the law, obviously tenants and those of us who are interested in protecting tenants’ rights have attempted to strengthen the law. That’s usually a debate that occurs around the time of the renewal. In the meantime, though, the fact is that it expires in 2011, but that does not prevent the legislature from strengthening the law in the meantime and the Assembly in particular has passed a broad package of bills that would address some of the things that we consider loopholes in current laws. So for example some of the things that Alex was just talking about how rent increases are calculated, that 20% figure, we have an Assembly bill that would significantly lower the 20% that generally applies when an apartment becomes vacant. We have bills that would close a loophole that has really been particularly problematic in this community, the way major capital improvements are handled. Currently the landlord gets to, when they make a major capital improvement in the buildings they get to work the cost of those into the rent over a very short period of time and then essentially continue to charge for those improvements indefinitely, long after they have been paid for. So we have a bill that we passed in the Assembly that hopefully might get approved by our colleagues in the Senate and the Governor that would essentially say that the cost of the improvement gets spread over 7 years and then ends. So that has been a way that our landlord in Stuyvesant Town/Peter Cooper Village in particular has increased rents. So there is a variety of things, all these are ultimately political decisions and we do need to make sure that people, if you are a tenant you are concerned about this, especially if you are someone who had not been previously concerned about it and it is probably is wise for you to educate yourself about these battles in the legislature and figure out where you could find ways to support people who support your point of view on this.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
Thank you Brian. Let me go back to the one of the nuts and bolts questions that we are getting from tenants here. Alex, you took us though the scenario about how you increase rents over time. Is there any scenario in which the rent stabilized amount is actually greater than the market rate amount and an apartment that changed hands six or seven times since a rent stabilized tenant moved, where reductions in the market rate, leases were negotiated? Is there a chance that is the case?

Alexander Schmidt:
There is a chance that that has occurred with respect to some of the apartments at issue. Particularly since the landlord has been reducing the market rate rents as new tenants come in. So it is conceivable that the legal regulated rent for certain apartments is greater than the current market rent. The implications of that are twofold. One, we believe that to the extent a current market rate rent exists it will continue to exist at that lower level until the current lease expires so there will be no bump up to the higher legal regulated rent until at least after the current lease expires. But going forward the regulated apartments will remain regulated so if there is another boom in the economy and local market rents start to skyrocket again, you will be protected in the future by having to pay only the regulated rent increases that are issued annually by the rent guidelines board, and you will not be subjected to the much, potentially much higher future market rate rents.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
Okay, let’s talk about damages here for a moment because we have talked a lot about the rent stabilized status of tenants but we haven’t yet talked a whole lot about the fact that in that scenario that we came up with here of the rent that is legally $2640 for somebody is paying $3500. What are the chances here that that rent will be rolled back to $2640 in the hypothetical situation that we outlined before?

Alexander Schmidt:
There are actually two questions embedded in that and let me answer each of them separately. As far as rolling back the rents we believe that the Court of Appeals’ decision requires Tishman to, going forward, reduce every market rate apartment to the legal stabilized level, so for our hypothetical apartment, that apartment should be renting at no more than the $2640 that we calculated. As far as damages, what that refers to technically in the legal sense is a refund for past rent overcharges so to the extent in prior years the legal regulated rent should have been lower than the market rent that the tenant was paying, the tenant is entitled to a refund of that difference and that is the critical question from our perspective that relates to the issue of retroactivity. Our reading of the Court’s opinion is that retroactivity relates solely to the rents that are due to be refunded and the question for the lower court in the first instance is whether or not Tishman is responsible for refunding past rents going back as far as, it will be seven years in January. And our view of the law is that they will have to refund those rents, but that is an issue that is open, as the Court of Appeals declined for the reasons I have said before. It ordinarily does decline to rule on such issues. Because the Court did decline we have to litigate that issue in the first instance in the lower court.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
Okay, so the two questions on damages are, one, the roll back from the 3500 to the 2640, and then the refund for all those years in which people have been paying the differentials.

Alexander Schmidt:
That is correct.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
And the differential obviously is different from year to year right?

Alexander Schmidt:
That’s correct.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
Okay, so that makes it a little more complicated and a little distinct for each apartment. Now, Jimmy Yan, who is the counsel to the Borough President, is here and they submitted a brief at the Appellate Division and at the Court of Appeals in support of the tenants’ position and spelled out what they believe their view is on retroactivity. Jimmy, do you want to make a comment on that?

Jimmy Yan:
Yeah, just quickly, we actually submitted a amicus brief on the trial level as well, where we lost and then an appellate brief in the Court of Appeals on behalf of the Manhattan Borough President, Scott Stringer at the Court of Appeals. We paid some special attention to the retroactivity issue and contributed an argument about that and we share the view of Alex that the law very strongly supports that relief should be retroactive. To bore you a little bit this is a three-part test which looks at what the nature of the court decision is and here they say that if the decision creates a new principal of law, if it doesn’t support existing law, if it creates inequities then perhaps it could be prospective only and not retroactive. Here the defendants actually cited a case that we thinks works much more in our favor, rather than in the landlord’s favor where it says that “ a Court’s decision relies merely on an interpretation of language and the statute,” which is what happened here, then the relief has got to be retroactive. So that’s just a little explanation of the argument we contributed, and we think it would be surprising in my view that any court felt that it should not be retroactive.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
Thank you, now Alex, the time frame here. When can we expect the Trial Court to reach a conclusion on all of this? It seems to be going on forever and ever from a, you know, a layperson’s perspective. When can we expect a ruling on the subject of damages?

Alexander Schmidt:
Unfortunately, litigation being the creature that it is, it’s always impossible to tell for sure when we’ll have a resolution of these outstanding issues. If we were in control of the entire process we would get it done as quickly as humanly possible. Unfortunately we are only one side of the equation and we do not control what the landlord’s thinking is and how long this case lasts, how long it takes to litigate these issues will depend largely on the positions that the landlord takes. If it wants to continue litigating, it will take longer. If it wants to sit down and try to resolve this then hopefully we can resolve it fairly quickly. Another factor, of course, is the Court itself. The Judge will set the timetable. Sometimes judges rule quickly, sometimes it takes them some time, and again, that’s a factor that we have no control over. So again, our hope is to get both the escrow issue and the retroactivity issue resolved as quickly as possible and we will make efforts to resolve it as quickly as possible, but ultimately how long it takes depends on the defendants and the court.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
Okay, so Alex, let’s break that down just a little bit so we understand litigation in long and complicated and people want to know though as a result of what happened last week, if you can advise me, Dan Garodnick, I am a market rate tenant, today is October 29th, and my rent is due in a couple of days, should I be paying my November rent and if so, should I be paying it in full and if so, why?

Alexander Schmidt:
Well those are all very, very good questions, and we have thought long and hard about the circumstances that were faced and what is genuinely and truly in the tenants’ best interest at this point in time. One of the complicating factors in this case that you don’t ordinarily see is that the defendant is in a position of uncertainty itself, as I am sure you have read from the newspapers and so on, Tishman is in danger of defaulting on its loans. And while we are hoping to resolve this as quickly as possible, we fear that the Tishman situation is preventing them from sitting down with us at this point. We don’t know, but we fear that that might be the case and given that we cannot, absent in agreement with Tishman, resolve the escrow issue, resolve what to do with the November rents, we think that for the immediate future, meaning November, it is in everyone’s best interest to go ahead and pay the market rent as if its going to be put into escrow, which we anticipate that it will be, and in the anticipation that when we ultimately resolve this the November rent differential that goes into escrow will come back to the tenants just like the rent differentials from the previous months beginning April 1 of this year. The judicial process just cannot move as fast as we want it to move when we have adversaries who aren’t cooperatively sitting down or who are unable to cooperatively sit down and resolve these issues with us quickly.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
Okay so, sorry were you going to finish that? I am sorry.

Alexander Schmidt:
Well no, I mean just to let you know what we are trying to do so that we don’t run into this problem again in December if we can avoid it. We will be, absent sitting down with Tishman, asking the Court, now that we have a mandate from the Court of Appeals, to, we are going to ask the lower court for a conference so that the court can help us set the timetable and the agenda for resolving these issues.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
Okay, so there is no way for them to simply avoid dealing with this by failing to sit down with you. Is that right?

Alexander Schmidt:
Well, they can try but they won’t succeed in deferring the problem indefinitely because we will take legal action to force them to assert their positions and to put the issue front and center in front of the judge so that the judge can make a decision as quickly as the judge is able to.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
And let’s say that hypothetical tenant, the $3500 tenant whose legal rent stabilized rent is $2640, if they pay their full $3400, I’m sorry $3500 in rents, the differential will go into escrow on November 1, is that right?

Alexander Schmidt:
Absolutely.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
Okay and that amount is protected for them?

Alexander Schmidt:
Certainly.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
Okay, lets talk about the class. People want to know, we’ve gotten a lot of questions on this and we have a question from a tenant on East 23rd Street, they want to know if their apartment is included in the class. They moved in in May of 2007, they think the apartment was already renovated, they have been paying market rates since they have moved in, they want to know if every market rate tenant’s rent is going to be reduced or how they, what they need to do to be part of the class, most significantly. What do they do today or I do today?

Alexander Schmidt:
Every market rate apartment is a part of the class. Every tenant in a market rate apartment is part of the class. You have heard the number 4400 apartments, that is the total number, an approximate total number, of market rate apartments currently in the two complexes. So every market rate tenant is what we would call a putative or potential class member and you are already protected by the lawsuit. We would like to know who you are if you haven’t notified us already as to your name and address and which apartment is yours and again if you would send that information to my colleges at the two emails addresses.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
Let’s give those again. We have had some requests that you give the email address again.

Alexander Schmidt:
Certainly, it is .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). And one thing that I want to say that is somewhat responsive to this question is that there are a number of rent stabilized residents in the complexes who would be subject to deregulation at some point in the future. While you are not technically members of the class, you are being benefited by this lawsuit because your apartments will not get deregulated, by current calculations, until the end of 2020 at the earliest. So while you are not class members you are benefited by this lawsuit.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
I want to go to that question in a second because we do have some of the $2000 a month renters who have incomes over or close to $175,000, which creates certain issues for them. Let me just stick to the class issue for a moment. We have a question here, what happens to individual tenants if the Court disallows the class to be certified? Just the technicals of class certification, we do not need to go into great detail here but obviously for a court, they are looking for commonality and the representative nature of the named plaintiffs and all of that stuff but for the basics here, what happens if the Court says you cannot handle everybody together, they are not similarly situated but rather individual tenants need to deal with this issue on their own?

Alexander Schmidt:
As of right now, before class is certified everyone is protected. If the Court ultimately decides not to certify a class, the practical affect of that will be that this case will continue, but only with the nine plaintiffs who have already been named in the lawsuit. All of the other class members will then have to file their own individual suit. So the case will be splintered into four, five, six thousand different lawsuits which could be in various forums. It could be in the DHCR, it could be in the Civil Court, if the damages are big enough it could be in the Supreme Court and ultimately reconsolidated with the current suit, but any class member will have time to file their lawsuit and they will continue to be protected, it is our belief, by this tolling of the statute of limitation in this case for purposes of their own individual suit. In the event that the Court declines to certify the class, we will ask the court to set a date by which individual members have to file their own suits while remaining protected by the statute of limitation’s tolling that is in effect in this suit and which enables every tenant to recover damages going back as far as January of 2003.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
And they would in that situation they would be doing that individually?

Alexander Schmidt:
They would be doing it individually.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
Okay, so I guess I should note that tenants should take a close look at the Tenants Association website on a regular basis, which is http://www.stpcvta.org. There will be constant updates about this. There is also a Facebook page dedicated to this J-51 issue for those who are Facebook inclined but there will be updates. Let’s talk about the opt-in question. Let’s say that there is a certified class. Let’s say the Court says okay, this is fine, these tenants look and seem the same here because they all overpaid for a long period of time and some of them even left because they couldn’t afford to stay and these tenants are the same for all intents and purposes. What would an individual tenant need to do to become a part of that class? Will you notify them? Will you get in touch with them somehow? How do they know how to participate in this?

Alexander Schmidt:
I have to admit that I lost the premise of your question.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
The premise of the question is if a class is certified.

Alexander Schmidt:
Yes.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
And a tenant wants to participate, how do they participate? Are you going to send them a letter at home and say dear putative class member, we would like you to know that the Court has certified a class action here and if you want to be part of this case all you need to do is fill out a form, or are you going to send them, you know, how are you going to do it?

Alexander Schmidt:
Well, typically what happens is that the Court orders a formal notification procedure. In this case one of the things we would ask for would be to require Tishman to give us name and address information so that each current resident can be notified by direct letter we will post, we will ask the judge to let us post a notice of class certification on the Tenants Association’s website. We will ask Tishman to provide last known addresses if they have them for former tenants, and to reach the former tenants we will probably do a notification by way of publication, which means that we would be having a notice printed in various seminal newspapers around the country.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
Okay, so let me go to the question about rent stabilized tenants who are . . .

Alexander Schmidt:
Let me just add to that because it was part of your question. Once tenants get notice of the lawsuit or former tenants get notice of the lawsuit, they are already members of the class and they don’t have to do anything unless, for some reason, they know they don’t want to be part of the lawsuit. If you want to be part of the lawsuit, then you can notify us of who you are so that we can put you on our direct mailing list and then we will contact everybody if and when it comes time to do what we would hope would be a claims administration process, where every tenant’s claims would be processed and damages rewarded.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
Okay, I am going to move on. We have a lot more questions and we are at 54 minutes but it looks like we are going to go a little bit over for those of you who are listening. We are not going to end going to end promptly in an hour because there are so many questions and there is a lot we still have to cover so with your indulgence Alex, we are actually going to keep plugging along? Great. You were about to talk about the impact on rent stabilized tenants who are getting close to the $2000 amount. Obviously high income decontrol applies for tenants whose apartments are over $2000 and or the family income is $175,000 or more for two consecutive years. What happens with folks who fall into that category, they just went over $2000 and they earn over $175,000 for two consecutive years?

Alexander Schmidt:
Well, the answer to that is that the Court of Appeals has just ruled that for buildings receiving J-51 benefits nothing happens. No apartment in the complex can be deregulated regardless of what the legal stabilized rent is and regardless of how much income the tenants have earned in the prior two years. That is the sum and substance effect and impact of the Court of Appeals’ ruling.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
Great, now another question. We have a tenant who is about to pass that $2000 mark and expects that Tishman Speyer is going to start asking for their tax return. The question is should I oblige or should I respond to their request for my tax return by saying that they are not entitled to deregulate my apartment?

Alexander Schmidt:
Well, the answer to that question is that until we have a final resolution that you should, Tishman is allowed between January 1 and May 1 of every year to do income verifications under existing law. Our position is that they should not do it in the upcoming year because the Court of Appeals’ decision made it very clear that they can no longer deregulate apartments. If, however, contrary to that, Tishman decides to send out these income verification forms and asks for your tax returns, we would recommend that you go ahead and provide the information for two reasons. First is that the DHCR has already indicated that it will not deregulate apartments even if Tishman applies for it until these issues in this case are ultimately resolved. So even if you supply the information, you will not be deregulated under the DHCR’s current stance. The second thing is there are provisions in the rules and regulations that if you do not comply with these procedures, for example if you receive after giving your income statement a petition for deregulation for Tishman, if you do not answer that, there is a potential for you to be deregulated on default grounds, not because you satisfied the deregulation requirement but because you haven’t followed the procedures. So there are two reasons to go ahead and provide the information and to go ahead and answer any petition that results from supplying the information because if you don’t answer the petition you could be evicted on default grounds, if you do answer it you will not be evicted or deregulated based on the DHCR’s current statement of intent not to do so.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
Okay, there a lot of rent stabilized tenants in Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, 60% of the properties are still rent stabilized. How about those tenants who are rent stabilized, their rent is well below $2000 in some situations. How will this impact them?

Alexander Schmidt:
Well, it will impact them to the extent that they will not be deregulated at least before, under current calculations, the end of 2020, even if their rent exceeds $2000 legally and even if they surpass the $175,000 for two consecutive years income threshold

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
And I would also add that over the past few years we have seen a lot of efforts to take rent stabilized tenants out of their apartment to move those apartments to the market rate. Because these are all rent stabilized apartments as you described previously, that incentive also does not exist and therefore there is no reason to move out a rent stabilized tenant who is legitimate and is paying their rent as they should. Let’s talk about the DHCR for a moment because you noted the rules and regulations of the DHCR. We note that you are recommending that tenants not file is the question which we got several times. You are recommending that tenants not file with the DHCR with a rent overcharge application even though the DHCR is recommending that they do file. Can you help us understand why you are advising tenants not to file or tenants in Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village at least and if there is a distinction there you should make it, why they should not be filing rent overcharge claims with the DHCR?

Alexander Schmidt:
The primary reason is that right now every market rate tenant is protected by this class action insofar is the statute of limitations is concerned. Any market rate tenant that files an individual action with the DHCR has some risk of having been deemed to have elected its remedy. Under the rules each tenant can either sue in court or sue administratively before the DHCR but they have to choose one or the other. And if you choose the DHCR before the decision on class certification, there is a potential that you will be deemed to have filed your action the day you go before the DHCR and you will not get the benefit of the statute of limitations tolling that that class action vehicle affords you. That’s the principal risk. The other reason we are recommending that you not file now is because we think it’s better for everyone to remain part of the class at least for the time being. The more people in the class the greater the potential for a global satisfactory resolution that will get money into the tenant’s pockets more quickly. If this case is not certified as a class and there are several thousand different lawsuits or if lots of people go and file their own lawsuits there is no way of controlling how quickly the DHCR will process the applications, how long it will take for the tenants to get their money. So those are the two principal reasons now. After the Class is certified, which we hope it will be, there’s always going to be, there is no waiver of your right to file with the DHCR by remaining part of the Class now. So you are protected if you ultimately want to file, which we would discourage you from doing anyway. You haven’t lost that right by remaining part of the Class.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
Okay, we have . . .

Alexander Schmidt:
Oh, let me just add something to one of my earlier responses and that had to do with the November 1 rents being put into escrow. I just want to clarify that because we are agreeing or recommending that you put those monies into escrow, pay your market rate rents for November, we will ensure by either agreement with Tishman or by going to court that those monies will indeed be put in the escrow account. So to the extent the language of the March 13 order suggests that the escrow is expiring by these terms if we were volunteering to put more money into the escrow account or to pay a market rent for November, Tishman better agree that the money goes into escrow and if they don’t, we will go to court immediately for an order to ensure that it does.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
Well it seems like Tishman Speyer could be creating additional problems for itself if they continue to charge market rents on apartments which are legally only able to be charged a rent stabilized rent, right?

Alexander Schmidt:
Absolutely.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
So, there is that too. It would seem to me that they would have an incentive to wrap this up and resolve that issue rather quickly because to the extent that that $3500 a month tenant is paying $900 more a month than they should and are still doing it or are still charged it by Tishman Speyer, that is potentially creating another whole host of legal issues. Am I wrong about that?

Alexander Schmidt:
No, you are 100% right and the principal problem it creates for Tishman is the problem of willfulness and the resulting treble damages that follow. Our very clear position is, and we think the Court of Appeals is very clear on this, that these market rate rents are illegal rents and under the law any rent overcharge is presumptively subject to treble damages. But the Landlord can come to court and convince the Court that it did not willfully overcharge the tenant. To the extent that Tishman keeps charging or keeps taking market rate rents, it is subjecting itself to willful overcharge claims and any amounts that it collects going forward above the legal stabilized rent level will be subject to being refunded to the tenants threefold. So for that, let’s make it simple, if it’s a $1000 rent differential instead of having to refund a $1000, Tishman will have to refund that tenant $3000.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
Okay, so we got a few questions about the future of the property. What does the future holds for Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village? We have been reading and I am going to try summarize all of the questions together but we have been reading for a long time that they are running out of money to pay for their debts and that there may be a foreclosure or bankruptcy on the property, some have estimated December, some have estimated January. This all precedes any of the stuff that we are talking about today. The question for you is let’s say there is an event like that, a foreclosure bankruptcy and, two parts here. One, what happens to that escrow account? Is that protected for tenants and number two, to the extent that there are retroactive damages ordered here, and there is a bankruptcy or foreclosure, will tenants still be able to avail themselves of that?

Alexander Schmidt:
The short answer to both of those questions is yes. As we have all been reading the reports, it’s pretty clear that this default situation was looming regardless of whether we prevailed in this action or not. So the fact that the Court of Appeals ruled in our favor really does not impact whether or not Tishman will default on its loans. It was going to default anyway according to the most recent reports. With respect to the escrow, we have done everything we think needs to be done to protect that money. For example, the escrow agreement made clear, and I am talking about the March 13th order again, that the money being put into escrow is not Tishman’s money. It is the tenants’ money. So to the extent there is a bankruptcy, that money should not be included as property of the bankruptcy estate. Second, to the extent that there is a foreclosure, City rules are very clear that the tenants’ overcharge claims, and the damages in the liability relating thereto, cannot be extinguished by a foreclosure or a subsequent sale. And our understanding is that applies in the bankruptcy context as well. So whoever is the ultimate owner of this property, be it Tishman, be it a new purchaser, be it bought at a foreclosure, be it bought out of bankruptcy, the liability will continue. So for example, if it’s a $200,000,000 liability, whoever purchases the property or whoever succeeds as owner of the property will be responsible for that $200,000,000.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
Thank you. We have some questions about a tenants’ bid, asking whether the tenants’ group will again try to buy Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village from the landlord and asking whether there could ever be a chance the tenants would have the opportunity to purchase their apartment. I will take this one Alex so it is not a pure legal question. The answer here is maybe. We have said for a while, I’ve said and the Tenants Association and the other elected officials, we have said that we are looking for the right partner here who will act benevolently toward the tenants and ensure that there will continue to be proper maintenance. We are, I think, most concerned about maintenance in a foreclosure or bankruptcy because that tends to be the first thing to go and I think I can speak for myself that we are getting more complaints about maintenance over the past number of months. We also want to protect the historic configuration of the property and its open spaces and its playgrounds, and preserve some form of affordability for this community for it to be accessible to middle class people into the future. The difference of course between this situation and 2006 is that the property isn’t publicly up for sale. But you will recall that our bid in 2006 did involve the conversion of the property to a cooperative in which tenants would have had the opportunity to buy their apartments. We will continue to look at that and all the options. We should all expect, of course, that there are negotiations going on between Tishman Speyer and its creditors and we don’t know what organization plan, if any, a bankruptcy court could impose upon them or the impact that that could have, but we do know that we can be a constructive player in this as we have been in the past. We are not going to sit and react and wait. We are planning to actively engage and are actively engaging. I just should share with the folks who are listening that I, along with all of my colleagues in government on the East side, the Tenants Association, we recently reached out directly to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac who are the holders of a large portion of the mortgage debt – the first mortgage – to see if we can work with them and the other lenders to ensure that we can control our own fate here. The fact that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are the owners of a considerable portion of the first mortgage is a significant fact because, of course, they are quasi-governmental and are supported with considerable tax dollars that we have paid. So we intend to be engaged in this process. We are looking for the right partners here and certainly are looking at all the options.
Some questions Alex on lease renewals. Let’s say there is a market rate apartment that has a lease that is about to end. Does Tishman Speyer have to renew it?

Alexander Schmidt:
Our position is that under the Court of Appeals’ ruling, Tishman does have to renew and it has to renew at the rent-stabilized rent. As of right now, as of the decision of the 22nd of October, it is our position that every market rate tenant at the complexes is legally a rent-regulated tenant, a rent-stabilized tenant who has all the protections of the rent stabilization laws including the automatic right of renewal.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
Somebody wants to know here if they are scheduled to move out before checks get cut do they forfeit their money?

Alexander Schmidt:
No. Everyone has a right to their money and just make sure if you move out that you email your email address, name and phone number to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
And what if your lease is up; let’s say it is up tomorrow. What does somebody do? Do they try to negotiate this or do they just point to the rent stabilization increases? What do they say to Tishman Speyer at this point?

Alexander Schmidt:
Well again, our position is that anyone whose market rate lease expires tomorrow is a rent regulated tenant and is entitled to renewal. Obviously, the paperwork and the new lease will not be given to you immediately. But our recommendation is that you stay in your apartment. You are a rent regulated tenant and you have a right to stay in your apartment.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
OK, we have a question from a tenant who lived in Stuyvesant Town for a year and signed a new lease in September but they didn’t get a countersigned copy of it. I’m going to get a little more granular here. They didn’t get a countersigned copy from the landlord. They were told that because of the lawsuit and depending on the pending potential decision at that point, that Tishman Speyer was holding off on signing new leases. They have sent over their rent payments and rent statements have continued to come in. The question here is are any of their rights under the decision in jeopardy?

Alexander Schmidt:
It is really the same answer as to the last question. Tishman has, due to the legal uncertainties that it is experiencing as a result of this decision, froze renewals and frozen even leasing out vacated apartments. But existing tenants, if you’re lease has not been renewed, we emphasize you are a rent stabilized tenant and you are entitled to renewal and just stay in your apartment and eventually the paperwork will get to you.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
OK, the next few questions, just as a little teaser here, because we are getting closer to the end, but I want to make sure people know it’s coming, I have question regarding new tenants, former tenants and then moving within the property. Waitlist questions, we have seen a few of those. So that’s what’s coming up.

First one is new tenants, can deal with this pretty easily. Alex, just moved to the Peter Cooper Village in August. Should we expect that our rents will drop to meet a rent stabilized level?

Alexander Schmidt:
At some point, as soon as we can get that accomplished, it should.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
Former tenants: We were tenants at Peter Cooper Village and were deregulated before the appeal, the decision before that went against the tenants. They moved out because they couldn’t afford the $3,500 a month. They want to know what recourse they have to either get back into a comparable Peter Cooper Village apartment or have some sort of compensation as a result of having to move out. So I guess this is a separate question from just the damages for rent overcharged, but rather it is about is there a possibility that compensation for former tenants could include getting them back in or compensating them for having to move.

Alexander Schmidt:
The answer to that question is one of the more complicated lingering questions. First of all, just to be clear, if you paid market rent before you moved out, you might be entitled to a refund of that. As far as your remedy if this class is certified, we cannot predict at this point that tenants in your position will be part of the class. That is because your damages are rather unique. Your damages are the relocation costs and the cost of moving, inconveniences, and while we are hopeful that you will be part of the class, or a subclass within the class action, the court could rule given all those individualized issues, that pertain to you, your unique circumstances, that a class is not or subclasses are not certifiable. So if that happens, then you will have rights and remedies but you’ll have to bring them individually and you will not be able to, for example, recover your moving costs as part of the class action. We are hoping to avoid that and certainly if we reach an agreement with Tishman, we are going to try to reach an agreement that would certify a subclass of tenants in your position. But that is a great uncertainly at this point. We just don’t know how to ultimately come out on that.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
OK. We have a question from a couple on East 14th Street. They live in a market rate one bedroom apartment. The lease is ending in a few months. About a month ago, they inquired about moving into a two bedroom apartment in February or so. They are expecting their first child. Congratulations by the way if you are listening. They didn’t get a straight answer about moving sooner but they were told that they could definitely move into a larger apartment when their lease ended. They want to know whether it will be possible to move over to a two bedroom apartment in February, since they inquired about it a month ago. They want to know whether they need to be added to a wait list. If so, how long is that list; how do they get on it; should they have been added to it when they originally inquired about the larger apartment? They are concerned about a rush to get onto any such list and that maybe there might not be any apartments available to them. And I should say that there are a variety of different iterations of that question that are out there. Can you shed any light on that?

Alexander Schmidt:
Again, that is a very unique situation. It is not at all clear that that issue can be remedied through the class action vehicle, given the procedural limitations of that vehicle. But like any other issue raised by a tenant, if we reach an agreement, a settlement with Tishman, those concerns might be addressable in the context of the settlement. And perhaps now that Tishman can no longer deregulate vacated apartments, it can create again a waiting list to prioritize existing tenants who are looking to upgrade.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
OK. I will add here also that Tishman Speyer is maintaining a list of current perspective tenants that are interested in apartments. They have not revealed to us or anyone their policies for how those lists will proceed. But if you are interested, you should call (212) 614-5836 for more information. Alex, let’s go to the next question here about the duration. How long people can expect their apartments to remain rent stabilized? Is that until 2020 as you said or can Tishman Speyer opt out of the J-51 benefit at an earlier date?

Alexander Schmidt:
Under currently existing rules and regulations, the apartments have to remain rent stabilized until the most recent J-51 application and benefit period expires. Apparently Tishman has calculated that to be the end of 2020 based on J-51 riders to renewal leases that it has asked the renewing tenants to sign. Whether or not that is an accurate date, we haven’t tested, so I cannot comment on that. And whether or not there might be some intervening change in the law that changes that date, we cannot predict. So barring any unforeseen changes, and assuming that Tishman’s calculation has been in good faith, that would be the end date for some apartments. There may be an issue of proper notice of that end date, and if it is ultimately deemed that Tishman has not provided adequate notice of that end date then the deregulation will not occur when the J-51 benefits expire but rather will occur when, for each apartment, when the tenant who lives there at the end of 2020 ultimately vacates the apartment.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
OK. Some have asked questions about individual representation. We talked about that in the context of if a class is not certified here but one questioner asks should market rate tenants have their own representation to ensure appropriate compensation as a result of the ruling?

Alexander Schmidt:
Well, right now, all market rate tenants are part of the class and we are representing them. And if the class is certified, we will continue to represent them. Until such point, again, that certification may be denied, we don’t think there is any reason for any tenant to incur the expense of individual representation.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
Now what would that do, let’s say they did; what happens in that context? Let’s say I go out and hire a lawyer to represent me in this and let’s say it does become certified as a class action. What happens then?

Alexander Schmidt:
Well, I mean, anyone can hire a lawyer to get a second opinion. If a tenant wants to do that, by all means, go ahead and spend the money and do that. That is a different question than filing an individual lawsuit. And if they hire another lawyer and that lawyer advises them to file an individual lawsuit, then the repercussions of that will be as I described before. There is a potential for them not to be protected by the statute of limitations tolling under the class action tolling doctrine. And they will not be part of the class for purposes of settlement in the future if they file their own suit and then they are deemed to have elected their remedy by doing so.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
OK. Let me make just one other clarification here. You noted earlier that you were advising Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town tenants not to file rent overcharge claims with the DHCR. Is that advice limited to tenants in this community, or if somebody happens to be listening to this call who is a tenant of another neighborhood, and is wondering themselves whether they should or should not file a rent overcharge claim, is the advice definitely the same or is it a you’d better check out the facts of your own building before you make a determination?

Alexander Schmidt:
The answer to both questions is yes. The advice is the same and I will explain why. And yes you should check out the facts of your own building. Obviously, this ruling only applies to buildings that have been deregulating while simultaneously deceiving J-51 benefits. And if your building doesn’t fall into that category, high income and vacancy deregulation can continue in your building. So this ruling does not impact buildings that are deregulating that do not receive J-51 benefits. So make sure you have that kind of a building first, one that receives J-51 benefits. Once you make that determination, yes, you can either file your own lawsuit with the DHCR or in court, but you may also want to consider filing a class action. If you file a class action, then you will be stopping the statute of limitations not only for yourself but for everybody else in the building. People who may not be aware of their right to file or aren’t following the news, or so on. So those are your two options. You can file for yourself and toll the statute of limitations for yourself, or you can try to file a class action and represent your entire building.

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
OK well Alex I think we’re going to have to leave it there. I want to thank you very much. Again, I want to thank you, Alex Schmidt, and your firm, Wolf Haldenstein, and I want to thank the Tenants Association for setting up this conference call, as well as our co-sponsors, the Borough President Scott Stringer, Jimmy Yan who is with us, Congressman Maloney, State Senator Tom Dwayne, Assemblyman Brian Kavanagh, who is with us. I hope that those who were on the call found it useful and I want to note that the Tenants Association has also prepared some frequently asked questions and you can find that on the Tenants Association website at http://www.stpcta.org. And if you have specific questions about the appropriate level of rent increases for you, for your specific lease renewal, you should contact Wolf Haldenstein as you heard earlier by sending them an email, and let me give you Michael Liskow’s email address one more time. It is .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). And there was a second email address?

Alexander Schmidt:
A second email address is .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Council Member Daniel Garodnick:
And if you don’t have access you can call 212-545-4600. And of course, we will continue to keep you up to date, I and my colleagues and the Tenants Association, as they progress. As noted at the outset we have recorded this conference call and we will be putting it online we expect on the Tenants Association website, so please check that website frequently. There are a lot of things happening and we have a lot to do here, but we do want to congratulate the attorneys here for their great work on this case, and with that, we’re going to call it a day. Thank you all for listening.