It's gonna cost you to go to court

[jot0n0]

Albany's Mistake: Tenants Must Pay To Go To Court

JULY 09TH, 2003 - Source: NY1

Landlords and tenants groups agree on at least one thing: state lawmakers screwed up. In the following exclusive report, NY1’s Rita Nissan explains why they're both going to have dig deeper in their wallets whenever they go to court.

Manhattan resident Claudette Spencer, a mother of four, walked into a housing court Wednesday to fight for a rent-stabilized apartment.

She said she can hardly pay her rent, but she'll now have to fork over even more money to settle her case.

“Every time I come to court, if I have to give them money,” she said. “They’re telling me if I don't have it, I’m on the street.”

She is not alone. Starting Monday, fees in housing and civil courts will be imposed.

Why? Simply put: the state messed up. When the budget was adopted in May, legislators passed a law permitting fees in state supreme court: $45 for every motion, $35 for every case settled.

But when the state's Office of Court Administration took a closer look at the legislation, it interpreted it to include housing and civil courts. Senate and Assembly leaders agreed to fix the discrepancy as a part of a budget-clean-up-bill.

On the last day of session, legislators passed separate versions of it, but left Albany without amending it.

“Hopefully things will change, but I have to be prepared to put this into effect,” said administrative civil court Judge Fern Fisher. “We are a court, and if this is in fact a law, we are obligated to enforce it,” said Fisher.

For tenants and landlords, that means they could have to spend hundreds of dollars to settle a case.

“We would like the Office of Court Administration to reconsider the position it’s taking and to take into account the hardships that are going to be imposed by tenants and landlords and the fact that this law was never intended to apply to housing court,” said Mitchell Posilkin, who represents a landlord group, the Rent Stabilization Association.

If that doesn't happen, the Rent Stabilization Association may sue. The Legal Aid Society, which represents tenants, is considering doing the same.

“Most people in housing court are being sued because they’re having trouble paying their rent,” said Judith Goldiner of the Legal Aid Society. “The idea that they are going to be forced to pay to go to court now is just a disaster.”

--Rita Nissan

[jot0n0]

Update:

State Rescinds Civil And Housing Court Fees

JULY 10TH, 2003

Chaos in the courts has been averted, as tenants and landlords who file cases in Housing Court found out Thursday they will not face hundreds of dollars in new fees.

As NY1 first reported, the fees in civil and housing courts were supposed to take effect next Monday, all because of a mistake by the state Legislature. When lawmakers passed the budget in May, it included legislation to raise fees in state Supreme Court. However, the measure was written so vaguely, the statute also applied to housing and civil courts.

Senate and Assembly leaders tried to fix the problem at the end of their session, but they passed bills that did not match.

After tenant and landlord groups threatened to sue, the state's Office of Court Administration stepped in late Thursday afternoon, saying it won't impose the fees because the Legislature did not intend for them to go into effect.

Lawmakers have until October 1 to fix the problem.

[consigliere]

The article below, by David Chen, appeared in the July 11, 2003 online edition of The New York Times.
 
Robert Sokolski, who, with his wife and law partner, Daphna Zekaria, write the summaries for Housing Court Decisions on TenantNet, is quoted at the end of the article. Suprisingly, it says that Sokolski and Zekaria represent landlords and tenants. Their ad on TenantNet gives the impression that they represent tenants only.
 
 
Judge Postpones New Housing Court Fees That Are Opposed by Landlords and Tenants Alike
 
Responding to concerns from an unusual alliance of landlords and tenants, the state's chief administrative judge yesterday postponed new fees in New York City Housing Court set to go into effect on Monday.
 
Landlord and tenant groups had worried that the new fees would be so onerous as to bar them from access to the court, where the two sides hash out disputes over rent payments and building services. The fees, which would have applied to actions that now cost nothing, like filing motions and settling cases, were mistakenly included in state legislation raising fees for other courts.
 
Judge Jonathan Lippman, the state's chief administrative judge, yesterday ordered that the courts not collect the new fees until Oct. 1 to give the Legislature enough time to correct the mistake. He said he had gotten the approval of the state comptroller, Alan G. Hevesi, whose office would ultimately be responsible for the collection.
 
"What we had to do in this kind of unusual circumstance was to make an administrative decision based on our reading of the legislative intent," Judge Lippman said. "And this was not their legislative intent."
 
Legislators in Albany have said that the new fees were created inadvertently when they agreed, as part of the overall state budget in May, to raise fees and create new ones for cases being filed in State Supreme Court. What the legislators later realized, though, was that those fees also applied to Housing Court. And while many legislators said they wanted to fix the mistake, they will not be able to do so until September at the earliest, when both chambers are expected to be in session again.
 
So in recent days, as word spread among housing lawyers about the imminence of the new fees, a coalition of tenants and landlords worked together to criticize the Legislature and the Office of Court Administration, which oversees the entire court system. In addition, at least two lawsuits were expected to be filed either yesterday or today, seeking to block the fees.
 
One immediate result of Judge Lippman's statement is that the two lawsuits will no longer be filed. It does not, however, affect a separate lawsuit that was filed in State Supreme Court in Nassau County on Wednesday by Kenneth M. Mollins, a lawyer in Garden City, challenging the legality of the Legislature's decision to raise all fees for State Supreme Court.
 
Had the new fees gone into effect on Monday, it would have cost a tenant or landlord $45 to file each motion in cases, when it now costs nothing. It would also have instituted a fee, for the first time, for actually settling a case.
 
"I think it's a good thing that they acted before they had a single person faced with the prospect of not being able to get access to the court because of money not being available," said Robert D. Goldstein, managing partner of Borah, Goldstein, Altschuler, Schwartz & Nahins, which represents the Rent Stabilization Association, a landlords' group. "They did a good job."
 
One potential Achilles' heel is what will happen if the Legislature changes its mind or fails to reconvene in September. Most lawyers and legislators believe this will not happen. But Judge Lippman was more circumspect: while he declined to speculate as to what would happen after Oct. 1, he said that "at the very least, if there ever will be such a fee, it gives appropriate time to plan for it."
 
So just in case, Robert E. Sokolski, who, with his wife and law partner, Daphna Zekaria, represents landlords and tenants in Brooklyn and Manhattan, said that he would not tear up the lawsuit he had been preparing to file any day.
 

[consigliere]

The article below, by Daniel Wise, appeared in the July 11, 2003 online edition of the New York Law Journal:
 
Lippman Suspends Imposition of New Civil Court Filing Fees
 
Chief Judge Jonathan LippmanSighs of relief were audible from all sides as Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman announced Thursday that he was suspending the introduction of new fees in Civil Court that had been set for Monday.
 
The new fees would have required defendants to pay $35 to file a stipulation of settlement and either side to pay $45 when bringing a motion. The fees were adopted as part of a package included in the state budget, adopted in May, that were designed in part to fund an increase in assigned-counsel compensation rates.
 
The impact of the fees was expected to be felt most severely in Housing Court, a division of the Civil Court. More than 209,000 motions were filed last year by pro se tenants, many of them facing eviction, according to Jack Baer, the chief clerk of the Civil Court. He further conservatively estimated that 300,000 stipulations of settlement were filed in the court each year. Court officials estimate that the new fees would generate between $10 million and $30 million a year in Housing Court alone.
 
Landlords and tenants alike had threatened to sue to head off the chaos that both sides feared would ensue if the new fees went into effect.
 
Justice Fern A. Fisher, the administrative judge of the Civil Court, said that "no issue had galvanized lawyers on both sides of the landlord-tenant bar to pull together the way this one has."
 
To get ready for the expected deluge of people seeking to pay the new fees, the court had ordered 12 to 18 new cash registers, double the amount the Civil Court currently has, Mr. Baer said. To operate the new registers, court clerks would have had to be re-assigned from other vital tasks, he added, noting that the number of cases filed in Civil Court has doubled in the last two years.
 
The problem in the Civil Court stemmed from a legislative mishap. Both houses of the state Legislature adopted measures which would have exempted the Civil Court from the new fees. However, the Legislature adjourned before the two measures could be reconciled and enacted into law.
 
Judge Lippman referred to the relief measures adopted by the Senate and Assembly when he announced that the new fees would be suspended in the Civil Court until Oct. 1 to give the Legislature time to deal with the issue. In a statement issued Thursday, Judge Lippman also said he had been assured by the heads of the Judiciary Committees in both houses that the Legislature did not intend for the fees on motions and stipulations to apply in Civil Court.
 
The new fees that will go into effect in Supreme and County Court statewide on Monday will include a $25 increase (to $210) in the filing fee, a $20 rise in the cost of a request for judicial intervention (to $95), and a $15 jump (to $65) for a notice of appeal.
 
Also going into effect in both those courts are the new fees of $45 for each motion, and $35 for the new requirement of filing a stipulation of settlement.
 
Even before the new fee schedule was enacted, landlords dealing with pro se tenants were required to file stipulations in Housing Court to make them legally binding, said Robert A. Goldstein, of Borah, Altschuler, Schwartz & Nahins, one of the major landlord firms in the city.
 
Mr. Goldstein, who was prepared to file a lawsuit on behalf of the Rent Stabilization Association to block implementation of the new fees, said imposing fees "on people who are having trouble paying their rent is not what the court system should be about."
 
"Justice may be blind, but it is not stupid — no one intended this to happen or believed it was right," he added.
 
Judith Goldiner, a specialist in housing issues at the Legal Aid Society, said that many tenants who come to the courthouse with an eviction only hours away could lose their apartments while standing in line to pay the fee or to get the paperwork completed to have the fee waived.
 
Judge Fisher expressed particular concern for the working poor who might have to go home to get the money or who might not be able to afford it.
 
The indigent can get "poor persons" relief, which provides for a waiver of court fees, according to state law.