landlords

The four-unit apartment building at 113 Jackson Street has been condemned by city officials and its residents relocated, but the owner says things sound a lot worse than they really are.

The most notable problem is the south wall, according to Guy Pellegrino, which is clearly bowed out, but Pellegrino said it was that way when he purchased the building 15 years ago and was in that condition years before he bought it.

It's never been an issue with city officials until now, he said, and it may not even be necessary to repair. He will need to hire a structural engineer to make that determination and present findings to the city.

The 4,000-square-foot building is 180 years old. The property is assessed at $115,000.

City Manager Jason Molino said 113 Jackson was closed for electrical, mechanical and structural code violations.

Molino said the Red Cross assisted, at least for the first day, the two tenants living in the complex after the building was condemned.

City officials only acted on the property after there was a report of a possible fire in one of the apartments Tuesday, Molino said. Firefighters found suspected code violations and a code enforcement officer was called to the scene.

According to Molino, tenants at the apartment were living in "deplorable conditions." The building was condemned, he said, because it was unfit for human occupancy.

Pellegrino has a different version of what city inspectors found at the complex.

First, the second-story apartments have been vacant since the Fall and are currently undergoing a complete restoration. The apartments have been gutted. The floors have been removed, the walls are being repainted and all the junk left by previous tenants thrown out.

"My plan has been once Spring rolls around is to finish the apartments and turn them into better quality units," Pellegrino said.

Pellegrino believes that it was the former upstairs tenants who have been the source of suspected criminal activity in and around the apartment building. After there was an armed robbery of a pizza delivery driver reported at that location, Pellegrino evicted both tenants, having them physically removed from the property.

A lifelong Batavia resident with a large family locally and other business interests, Pellegrino said the reports of criminal activity at the address, especially the suspected armed robbery, were a real embarrassment.

"That's not who I am," Pellegrino said. "I don't want people to have that impression of me. Once I thought they had something to do with it, I got rid of the tenants."

What Pellegrino didn't know, he said, was that one of his downstairs tenants was a hoarder and was stealing electricity from a neighboring apartment.

"The only person living in deplorable conditions was the hoarder," Pellegrino said.

The woman who lived in the other apartment kept her place clean and there was no problem with that unit, Pellegrino said.

The man had lived in the apartment for 10 years, according to Pellegrino.

"His rent was $600 a month and he paid it like clockwork," Pellegrino said. "I had no reason to believe he was a problem and I had no cause to go into his apartment."

The resident, Pellegrino said, created the alleged electrical code violations by removing electrical panels so he could tap into the power lines of another apartment, and running extension cords into his apartment.

Each apartment has its own electric meter and tenants are responsible for their own utilities, so Pellegrino doesn't get the electric bills and had no idea the tenant no longer had his own electric service to his apartment, he said.

One thing people don't understand, Pellegrino said, is that when a landlord rents to Section 8, HUD or any other social services tenant, the apartments are inspected by the government before the tenants move in. There's never been a problem with his apartments, Pellegrino said.

Other than the issue with the south wall, everything the city says is a code violation will be easy to fix, Pellegrino said. If a structural engineer clears the long-standing bowed south wall, then it will no longer be an issue, Pellegrino said.

There's a dumpster behind the apartment that's half filled with junk and garbage bags. The dumpster was originally brought in to help with the gutting of the two upstairs apartments. It's also being filled with the decades-long accumulation of junk left in the basement by former tenants, and, Pellegrino said, the hoarder has already started cleaning out his apartment and throwing stuff in it.

After 15 years in the residential rental business, Pellegrino is ready to get out. All of his properties are going up for sale, he said.

He was leaning in that direction before 113 Jackson was condemned, he said, but he's been "just sick" about what happened with the property and he's had enough. He thinks a lot has changed about the kind of tenants a landlord has to deal with in Batavia over the past 15 years. It's just not a good business to be in, he said, especially for someone who values his reputation in the community.

Rather than auction away foreclosed homes, maybe the city should offer them first, at a minimal cost, to city employees, Councilman Tim Buckley suggested at Monday's Batavia City Council meeting.

His idea met with some resistance, particularly Councilwoman Rose Mary Christian, who said any such program should be open to the entire community.

But the gist of Buckley's proposal got some support -- rather than auction off homes that the city has seized for unpaid taxes, the city should create a program to turn them into owner-occupied residences. Instead of taking a chance that through the auction process they become rentals, find buyers who want to fix them up as their own homes.

"We should set up some type of committee to look into taking foreclosures and selling the property at a minimum cost to employees with some guarantees, and one of the guarantees would be that would agree to live in the property or five years," Buckley said.

In Buckley's plan, city employees would get the property a low cost, giving them instant equity that they could borrow against and invest $20,000 to $30,000 in home restoration.

There are 130 people employed by the city.

“When I was a young patrolman, I know I would have jumped at a program like this,“ Buckley said.

Christian said she was totally against the idea of making such a program available only to city employees.

"I would rather offer it to the whole community than just one single group," Christian said.

Councilman Frank Ferrando struck a middle ground, saying opening such a program to the whole community at first might pose too many complications.

"I think what Tim is saying will give us better control, and if the program works, we can expand later," Ferrando said.

City Manager Jason Molino agree to research a similar program Buckley said was once in place in Rochester, as well as what other cities might be doing along similar lines, and report back to the council.

It's a civil matter, say local prosecutors, after looking at a recent case of alleged damage done to an apartment at 122 Summit St.

The Batavian reported on May 4 that landlord Willard Preston called in police after viewing holes in walls, broken window frames and piles and piles of trash allegedly left by a tenant recently evicted.

Batavia Police Officer Ed Mileham said this evening, following his investigation into the matter and reviewing the evidence with an assistant district attorney, that there is insufficient proof for a criminal mischief charge.

Mileham said he has successfully brought a case to the district attorney's office involving tenant damage to an apartment. But in that case, there was clear evidence that the damage was done in a short amount of time and after the tenant expressed a desire to break a lease.

In this case, the tenant was in the apartment for a year and a half and there's no evidence that the damage wasn't anything more than carelessness carried out over the entire span of the tenant's residency.

Willard and Duane Preston didn't like what they found this morning when they entered an apartment Willard owns at 122 Summit Street, Batavia, so they called police.

Three doors had been pulled from the hinges, they said, three windows busted out, trash and debris littered the attic and the garage and there were numerous large holes in the walls.

They blamed the tenants they just evicted, and spurred by a recent article on The Batavian, they decided maybe they could get the police to pursue a criminal case against their former tenants.

"What is the city doing to help landlords?" Willard said. "The city can tell the landlords what to do, but the landlords can't tell the city what to do.That's my point. Damage is done? Fine. Get them in court. Put them in jail. If they're on social services, then cut it. Get them out of here. Send them back to Rochester or Buffalo."

Officer Ed Mileham confirmed he's conducting an investigation, but said he preferred not to discuss the case further. 

Police Chief Randy Baker said last week that while it's possible to look at tenant damage as a criminal matter, gathering sufficient evidence to make an arrest can be difficult.

"We have a level of proof to meet before it’s a criminal matter," Baker said. "One is, was it intentionally done or recklessly done? Then it’s a matter of identifying who did the damage. We can’t always meet all those criteria, so sometimes we can’t file the criminal charges."

Mileham said he did have a case about a year ago where a woman trashed an apartment owned by James Pontillo, and in that case, Mileham said, he did make a felony arrest.

In the case of the former tenants at 122 State, a woman was originally living there with a boyfriend who had "a good job in Rochester," Willard said. She was drawing social services benefits and had a job, too.

After breaking up with her boyfriend, apparently, she asked permission to have another man move in with her, to help her pay the rent.

"Why not?" Duane said. "It helps her and it helps us. What are we going to do, say no?"

But it wasn't long, Duane said, before the couple stopped paying rent, so they started eviction proceedings. It was during the eviction period, Duane said, that he believes they did most of the damage to the apartment.

"When she moved in, the apartment was clean and recently painted," Duane said. "It was beautiful."

Pointing to an abandoned couch, Willard said that it would cost $10 to have it removed, and $10 for each of the busted TVs left behind, plus $35 for a broken smoke detector, and all of the debris left in the attic and the garage.

"The small stuff like this ads up into thousands of dollars, at least $2,000," Willard said.

And it's hard to collect from tenants like those who just moved out, Duane said, because she's on DSS and the boyfriend -- whom he said claimed to be the son of a local contractor -- worked for various roofers, contractors and property owners around the city, always getting paid allegedly under the table, so there's no way to garnish the wages of either tenant.

While both of these former tenants have longtime roots in Batavia, both Duane and Willard pointed to transplants from Rochester and Buffalo as a cause for deteriorating neighborhoods.

"Batavia used to be pretty rosy," Duane said. "I've been in this business for 20 years. The streets used to be beautifully lined and the houses were all kept up. Now -- well, I'm glad we have an enforcement officer who says, 'let's get things cleaned up.' That's great because I'd like to protect my investments."

Top photo, Duane Preston points to debris in the attic. Bottom photo, Duane and Willard hold broken hinges, which Willard said showed no sign of wear or rust, but were just sheared off.

The responsibility for maintenance of property in the City of Batavia -- landlords or tenants -- was a topic of discussion again on Monday night during the City Council meeting.

Councilman Bob Bialkowski raised issues brought up at a recent Neighborhood Improvement Committee meeting, when City Court Judge Robert Balbick paid the committee a visit.

Bialkowski wanted to know if enforcement actions were being taken against the right people, and whether some matters might be better turned over to the police.

City Attorney George Van Nest and City Manager Jason Molino said most of the matters that reach a court hearing stage are targeted at the right people -- the landlords -- because they are "brick and mortar" issues.

Molino said 25 of the last 28 court cases the city has prosecuted have been for such structural issues as peeling paint, rain gutters, fire damage and roofs.

"That's something we to focus on," Van Nest said.

Now that summer is rolling around, there will be more attention paid to debris issues, Molino said, but letters will be sent to both tenants and landlords.

Molino said the city's efforts are paying dividends and that many landlords are working with the city to identify and address problems.

"The enforcement is happening, the compliance is happening, much faster than it has in the past," Molino said. "I think the system that we’re using, the accountability system, is really being followed."

Bialkowski said he would like to see city police and code enforcement work more closely with landlords on cases where a tenant has seemingly engaged in criminal conduct before vacating an apartment or house.

"The judge thought some of these might be taken up as a criminal matter because they are so malicious," Bialkowski said. "I remember a couple of yeas ago, a friend of mine did serve an eviction notice on a tenant and he showed me pictures of the aftermath – this was way beyond civil – they just basically destroyed this entire dwelling. We need to look at possibly some communication with the police and code enforcement on what is the best way to handle this."

Molino said the police will look at possible criminal matters, but building an actual criminal case can be difficult and, after the meeting, Chief Randy Baker agreed.

"We have a level of proof to meet before it’s a criminal matter," Baker said. "One is, was it intentionally done or recklessly done? Then it’s a matter of identifying who did the damage. We can’t always meet all those criteria, so sometimes we can’t file the criminal charges."

Molino also noted that keeping a property in compliance is also a landlord responsibility because it's the landlord who approved the tenant in the first place. He suggested that local landlords do a better job of communicating with each other about bad tenants.

"Some of the responsibility ultimately falls on the landlord in these cases to do their proper review, their proper screening on tenants and the history of tenants," Molino said.

One of the complaints of landlords in Batavia is that when there is a problem with a property, the city rarely issues a violation notice against the tenant.

It's usually the landlord that gets hauled into court.

It doesn't have to be that way, according to City Court Judge Robert Balbick.

Balbick spoke with members of the Neighborhood Improvement Committee on Thursday afternoon.

"Under city code they are both responsible," Balbick said. "I don’t choose who the defendant is. That's the choice of the city."

Council members Sam Barone, Rose Mary Christian and Bob Bialkowski were on hand for the meeting.

Balbick told them they could amend city code to require tenants to be included in any enforcement action.

Batavia landlord Terry Platt is on the committee, and he said he would certainly like to see Batavia become known as a place where, if you're a tenant and you cause a code violation, you're going to be held responsible.

“If we could work toward the tenant area and let the tenants in this city know that they are going to be held responsible, then over a five- to 10-year period this city could be just like Stafford -- Judge Muskopf set a precedence there," Platt said. "When you drive through Stafford today, you still slow down. He set a precedence. (Tenants will learn) 'Hey, don’t do that because you’ll get nailed in this city.'"

Balbick also suggested that landlords could call police for some enforcement actions against tenants.

“I’ve looked at pictures and the things that happened in apartments and it borders on being criminal," Balbick said. "Some of the damage isn’t just wear-and-tear on carpets. Some of the damage is holes in the walls and broken windows. You have your civil remedy but people may consider other remedies, such as going to the police. And have the police department address it as criminal mischief."

Platt said he's tried that route and the response from the police is always, "it's a civil matter."

Platt said 10 years ago, he and his crew were in an apartment doing work and they found a pound of marijuana. He said he told police and the police didn't want to take action, since Platt hadn't seen it actually being carried into the apartment.

So, Platt said he went to the tenant and told him he had two choices -- stay and he was calling the cops or move out.

“I knew the cops wouldn’t do anything, but I knew he’d get out if I said that, and he did," Platt said. "I wanted him off my property because I didn’t want that on my property.”

A good portion of Balbick's conversation was directed at explaining how court works for code-enforcement matters.

Disclosure: Terry Platt is my residential landlord.

The much-disputed sale of a tax-foreclosed property at 9 Willow St., Batavia, reached a resolution tonight as the city council approved the sale of the house to Stafford resident Tom Englerth.

He was the second-highest bidder for the property -- contrary to a previously published report by the Batavia Daily News that Habitat for Humanity placed the second-highest bid -- with a bid of $20,500, which was $500 less than the highest bid by Michael Pullinzi.

Pullinzi's bid was rejected by the council two weeks ago for apparently having been cited too many times for code violations. (Pullinzi has noted that his violations are not nearly as numerous as some local landlords and that some of the alleged violations were actually on neighboring properties.)

The contentious decision carried over to tonight's meeting as Councilman Bob Bialkowski asked the council not sell the property to Englerth, but instead re-auction the property at an upcoming county auction.

Bialkowski's motion failed 2-7 with only Councilman Sam Barone backing the motion.

“It’s unfortunate that nobody asked the high bidder what his intention for the home was," Bialkowski said, noting that Pullinzi has previously gutted and remodeled homes on North Lyon and in Le Roy and is current converting a two-family apartment building into a single-family residence on Fisher Park.

Council President Marianne Clattenburg expressed concern that since Englerth had probably been notified of the council's pending vote, to switch directions at the last minute might expose taxpayers to a costly lawsuit.

Councilwoman Kathy Briggs also showed some exasperation with Bialkowski's motion.

"We didn’t accept the first one, now the proper procedure is, we go to the next bidder," Briggs said. "End of discussion."

Councilman Frank Ferrando spoke at length for the council to come up with a better policy for dealing with the sale of tax-deliquent properties.

“I don’t know what alternatives we have, but there have to be better alternatives relative to the vision we have to make our neighborhoods better," Ferrando said.

Ferrando didn't expect an answer tonight from City Manager Jason Molino, but he asked him what the city was doing to hold tenants more accountable, echoing a theme of a recent story on The Batavian.

After Bialkowski's motion failed, the council voted unanimously to sell the property to Englerth.

Pictured, Bialkowski, top, and Briggs.

A number of local landlords are deeply concerned over the Batavia City Council's decision a week ago to deny Michael Pullinzi the chance to buy a piece of property he won at city auction.

The 5-4 vote punctuates a growing frustration with the code-inspection process, which they say puts an unfair burden on the landlords without holding tenants accountable.

Jeremy Yasses (pictured), an Oakfield resident who owns eight properties in the city, as well as several other tenant-occupied buildings outside of Batavia, describes himself as a budding entrepreneur who is trying to build a real estate business.

The 13 citations mentioned by the council against Pullinzi as the reason for denying him the chance to purchase 9 Willow St., is piddling compared to other landlords, according to Yasses. Other landlords, both on and off the record, say much the same thing.

Yasses, for his part, readily admits to getting between 40 and 50 citations a year from city inspectors.

Almost all of them, if not all of them, are for things tenants have done.

And that's the problem, according to Yasses. Tenants are not held accountable, so there's no motivation for them to change. If a tenant puts his garbage out on Wednesday, Yasses gets a notice, so he goes and picks it up on Thursday to correct the violation. Then the same thing happens the next week, and the next.

"Did we get to the root of the problem?" Yasses asks.

"I own the property. I’m held accountable," said Yasses. "I’m not passing the buck, but have the tenant standing right there next to me (in court). That’s how you hold them accountable."

Terry Platt, who operates one of the largest residential rental businesses in the city, said he's no stranger to receiving violation notices for things tenants have done, and he's concerned, also, that the current system isn't really helping to address the problem.

"There's no tenant responsibility," said Platt, who also serves on the city's Neighborhood Improvement Committee (NIC). "We can kick them out, but if they move out, they just move to someplace else in the city and do the same thing over again. How is the city going to clean up the city if there is no tenant accountability?"

(Point of disclosure: Platt is my landlord.)

From the city's perspective, the only option is to hold the landlords accountable. They're the ones who own the property and the only recourse for the city is to cite property owners for any problems outside a house or apartment.

City Council President Marianne Clattenburg said residents want to live in a cleaner city and the citations landlords receive is, at least in part, just the cost of doing business.

"We really don't have a lot of recourse as far as the tenant goes," Clattenburg said. "The only person responsible is the property owner. That's just the way the system is."

Clattenburg is no stranger to getting cited for violations she didn't cause. Two years ago, then-City Inspector Mike Smith wrote her up because her garbage can was next to her house, rather than behind it. The notice came, said Clattenburg, on a day the staff was conducting a citywide sweep on code enforcement. Her trash had been picked up that morning and she was at work, when her father-in-law, who lives next door and has health problems, moved her trash can from the street just to help out.

Still, Clattenburg, a school teacher, thinks landlords need to do a better job of policing the conduct of their tenants, perhaps offering incentives, such as rent breaks, for not getting citations.

"The landlords are in business," Clattenburg said. "If it wasn't a business, if they weren't making money, they wouldn't be doing it. Every business has obstacles and faces difficulties. That's just part of owning your own business. You figure out ways to deal with that."

Yes, it is a business, landlords will tell you, and because it is a business, solutions don't come as easily as city officials seem to think they should.

As we spoke while standing in the front room/kitchen of a house the 33-year-old Yasses is rehabilitating on Thorpe, Yasses said the best he could hope for from that piece of property was $250 per month net profit. That's after mortgage, flood insurance and taxes are paid, and only if the tenant paid the water bill and pays rent on time and there was no maintenance on the 100-year-old building.

“That’s not a lot, especially when you look at the fact that I’ve got four vacancies and I just spent five grand here," Yasses said. "If you take all that into account, that’s two years income all right here in one house.”

Meanwhile, he's grappling with the city over a tenant's car that has no license plate. The tenant, Yasses said, is a essentially a single mom (her husband doesn't work) who works part-time at a fast-food place. She can only use her mobile phone for text messages because all she can afford is a $10-per-month plan. She couldn't afford insurance on her car, so she had to remove the license plates. The city cited Yasses and said it needed to be covered with a tarp.

"So I hounded her, 'put a tarp on it, put a tarp on it' because Ron (Panek, city inspector) hounded me, 'put a tarp on it,'" said Yasses. "She went and bought a blue tarp, covered it. It’s not good enough. You need to have a tarp that’s fitted to the car. I didn’t even know that. So Ron goes, 'we’re going to have to go to court then.' I said, ‘fine. We’ll go to court.’

"Now wait a minute," Yasses added. "We paid a guy to make three visits and make two phone calls, and now we’re going to pay the city attorney to take me to court for a tenant’s car? And we’re hurting for money in the city? Maybe we need to tighten up our belts and our shoelaces a little bit and figure out what’s going on. That’s my point – I think we’re wasting some money and we’re just masking the problem"

Yasses thinks city officials and some NIC members don't have enough experience dealing with low-income people to really understand what many landlords are up against.

Eviction, of course, is an option, but it can also be difficult and expensive, especially if a tenant has been paying his rent on time. It begins with $500 in legal fees and ends with cleaning up the apartment (which can be especially costly if the tenant took vengeance on the evicting landlord) and then searching for a new tenant. The process can take months, especially if a good-paying tenant fights the eviction.

And in the end, a landlord may not even have improved his tenant situation.

"The new tenant is going to be the same pool of tenants," Yasses said. "The next tenant is going to be the same quality – and I don’t mean it that way, because they’re good people, just down on their luck – the next tenant isn’t going to be any better than what I had. We need to train them and teach them and hold them accountable, along with us."

City officials, NIC members and his Fifth Ward Representative Kathy Briggs need to come down on Thorpe and meet some of his tenants and see what he's doing to rehabilitate his buildings, Yasses said. He repeated several times that his tenants are good people just having a hard time, and that he's doing everything possible to improve the quality of his holdings as fast as he can in order to attract, hopefully, better tenants. But it takes time and money, he said.

“I’m doing the best I can," Yasses said. "You can’t get anybody decent to come down on Thorpe Street. When I bought this about four years ago, there was a ton of drug activity right here and right next door, bad, bad, bad. I got fed up, thought I could be the hero and forced these landlords to sell me these houses to get rid of the garbage. I can say right now, I have no drugs down here."

The property Yasses owns on Watson, Thorpe and Maple were probably bad investments, Yasses readily admits. He's losing money on them and gets by only because his investments in other jurisdictions are doing well.

And that's part of the problem -- Yasses said he doesn't have issues with municipal officials in other jurisdictions that he has in Batavia.

“I rehabilitated a four-unit in Middleport and they absolutely love it," Yasses said. "I’m putting my money where people appreciate it. ‘Wow, Jeremy, you put a new roof on, you painted, new windows – this looks great.’”

If he could walk away from his Thorpe area properties and take a $10,000 loss on he each, he said he would, but he doesn't have that kind of money. So he's committed to doing the best he can with them. He has no choice.

“I don’t want this to be a negative thing on the city," Yasses said. "The main problem is, you’ve got to have tenant accountability. I’m not the one putting the trash out. I’m not the one with the vehicles. If you really want to change, that’s what we need to do. Not by fining me. You can fine me. I can go before the next judge next Friday (on the car/tarp case)  – I hope he doesn’t take offense if this gets out there – but he could fine me five grand. He could put me in jail. But at the end of the day, the car still isn’t covered or taken care of because we didn't go to the source."

Michael Pullinzi says he has a record as a landlord that he will stack up against anybody.

He feels he was treated unfairly by the Batavia City Council on Monday when the council voted 5-4 to deny him a property at 9 Willow St. that he won in a city auction of delinquent tax properties.

"I challenge them to do a fair comparison of all landlords in the city on the same seven-year period, and I guarantee I will be near the bottom of that list," Pullinzi said in a comment left on the site. "I put over $100K into my properties last year alone and have several open contracts for windows, roofs, siding, carpet, already for this year. I have always been very cooperative with code personnel and all issues are resolved promptly."

Pullinzi's comment was removed because The Batavian has a policy of not editing comments, but there was one sentence that ran counter to site standards.

A copy of the memo given to council is thin on details, but lists reported violations that appear to have more to do with tenant conduct than landlord misconduct.

The list violations include failure to remove debris, yard waste and garbage. The memo also cites grass violations in "multiple" years at 4 Swan St.

Other reported violations include "paint" and "interior viol."  There was also reportedly an unlicensed auto reported at 44-46 Walnut St. in 2003.

"If they had bothered to contact me, I could have explained the most of the 13 code citations over seven years were tenants putting out an extra bag of trash," Pullinzi said. "Most issues in the notices were resolved before I even received the notice and I never had to received a secondary notice on any matter."

The memo states that all violations were corrected and that none of the property owners who bought property at the auction had any outstanding violations, nor had any of the property owners been billed for corrective actions taken by the city.

Among the violations Pullinzi said he received notice on was for a driveway that needed potholes fixed.

"The problem was that it was not my driveway and instead was a city alleyway along the side of my property," Pullinzi said. "To date, the city has not fixed the potholes they demanded I fix, and it has been years."

While the city memo doesn't specify police calls to properties owned by Pullinzi, he said any concern about such calls is misplaced.

"I rent to a lot of handicapped and special-needs tenants and the majority of the police contacts were for emergency medical care calls," Pullinzi said. "Others were for my finding a tenant in a diabetic coma about a year ago, and another contact was my finding the tenant deceased and contacting police. I guess (City Council President Marianne) Clattenburg and (Councilwoman Kathy) Briggs are saying no one should rent to ARC or special-needs individuals or those with medical concerns."

Pullinzi owns properties at 4 Swan, 44-46 Walnut St., 25 Fisher Park, 203 Ross St. and 511 Ellicott St.