For the third time in as many years, attorneys were in court testing the robustness of the City of Kingston’s rent regulations.
Only this time it was before the state’s highest judicial body, the New York Court of Appeals.
Anyone appearing in court must first climb the front steps and enter the white stone building underneath soaring columns and portico.
Almost every inch of the courtroom walls is encased in carved and molded-wood panels. The carpets and curtains are blood-red, and the oil paintings of more than 60 black-robed judges who once ruled in the courtroom haunt the proceedings below. The near-nautical scene, with varnished wood rails and flashes of gold and brass, is lit by chandeliers with globes of light suspended from the ceiling.
The attorneys must stand alone and answer for their reasoning. The seven judges sit behind their raised bench ten feet away — watching, listening, interrupting with questions.
Some unseasoned attorneys, overwhelmed by the pressure, become tongue tied. Not Magda Cruz, attorney from the law firm Belkin, Burden and Goldman, who represent the landlord appellants in the matter at hand, and not Barbara Graves-Poller, corporation counsel for the City of Kingston.
“This is what I enjoy doing,” Graves-Poller confessed, “more than any other professional responsibility.”
Legal questions only
The Court of Appeals is not interested in the copious details with which a counselor constructs their case. It does not retry cases or hear new evidence. That’s for the lower courts. The Court of Appeals hears only appeals, and it only hears them from appellate courts who themselves have already ruled on an appeal.
“Typically, the Court of Appeals isn’t a fact-finding court,” Graves-Poller explained. “It’s a court of law, so there has to be a legal question.”
Did the previous judges correctly interpret the law and apply it judiciously? Was the process Kingston followed to perform a rental housing vacancy rate sound enough to justify enacting rent regulations?
A number of intervenors were piggybacking on this court case.
Sarah L. Rosenbluth, of the Attorney General’s office, represented the Division of Housing and Community Renewal. Marcie Kobak from Legal Services of the Hudson Valley represented tenants affected by the rent regulations.
The vacancy study
The original challenge to the city’s vacancy study, brought by Hudson Valley Property Owners Association, was defeated first in the Ulster County Supreme Court and then again in the region’s Appellate Court.
Graves-Poller in part revisited her defense of the performance of Kingston’s vacancy study for the third time in as many years but first and foremost, she responded to crucial questions of law and how it had been applied to the specifics.
When it was over, Graves-Poller answered questions from the court steps.
Because the precedent created for the proper performance of the vacancy study had been demonstrated and strengthened through the lower-court ruling, Graves-Poller sounded confident of the righteousness of the city’s position.
“If the city had not done a reasonable job to reaching out to potentially affected property owners, there would be a public record to accompany our vacancy study,” said Graves-Poller.
“Say if we said that we had sent out surveys and then during a public hearing afterwards you have dozens of property owners saying, ‘I never got that thing or I have the data and you just didn’t give me enough time’, then the court could look at our compliance with a statute of law.”
“The problem for the landlords,” continued Graves-Poller, “is they know our data is correct. If they had contrary data, they would have presented it. But instead what they did was appeared at the public hearings to go to the qualitative component of the Common Council’s findings rather than the data component …. When you look back at the record, they asked, ‘Is there a need for regulation’ and that’s totally fair. They should come and advocate on that policy issue. But if they had methodological concerns, they should have raised it as the statute requires.”
Graves-Poller asserted that the landlords didn’t have a single property owner who rebutted Kingston’s vacancy study.
“That’s not a number that rebuts our vacancy study,” said Graves-Poller. “That’s flimflammery.”
Next steps
If Cruz fails to persuade the court, her law firm has the option of filing a petition for a writ of certiorari in a gambit to summon the attention of the United States Supreme Court. Cruz has argued in front of the US Supreme Court before. And the law firm has filed such an appeal before, challenging the 2019 HSTPA rent stabilization law for another landlord organization in New York City.
While the Supreme Court rejected that petition, Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas famously expressed an opinion which has been widely interpreted as encouraging landlord lawyers to try again.
The New York Court of Appeals typically hands down its decisions in six to eight weeks, but has been known to issue some in as early as 30 days.
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