Dick Hubert’s Worldview: Evictions in Rye Town Courtrooms; untold misery with one bright spot
June 19, 2024 at 11:33 p.m.
If you are a subscriber to the Westmore News, the odds are you have a good clean place in which to live.
Be grateful that you’re not one of the Rye Town residents who is renting a dilapidated apartment and, worse yet, has fallen behind on paying your rent.
Those are the folks who wind up in eviction proceedings in Rye Town Court.
I’ve seen their misery in person as a reporter in the courtroom, but not for five years.
This is a story of what prompted me to visit the Court again, and what I found—with one surprising piece of good news for the renters.
D.A. candidate Susan Cacace
starts me on an interesting journey
During my telephone interview with County Democratic Primary D.A. candidate Susan Cacace for last week’s column, I asked if as District Attorney she would support efforts to open the courts for video and still cameras—as they are wide open in, for example, the state of Georgia.
Cacace replied, to my astonishment, that the Court system already had an online application for audio/visual coverage inside the courtroom, and if I applied, it would be up to the judge in the case I wanted to cover if I were allowed in.
So, since I wanted to apply to get into the Rye Town courtroom with a camera to cover eviction proceedings, I filled out the application with a cover note and sent it to Judge William J. Giacomo, who as a Westchester County Supreme Court Justice is Supervising Judge of the Town and Village Courts.
He in turn told me to send it to Rye Town Presiding Judge Anthony M. Provenzano, who told me in 25 years on the bench he had never seen or heard of such an application.
Provenzano in turn sent my application to Town judges Jeffrey Rednick and José Castaneda.
Rednick immediately invited me, while Castaneda failed to respond as of press time.
But when I went to Rednick’s courtroom on June 12, I found that while I was allowed to take my iPhone past the guard desk and into the courtroom, I wasn’t allowed to take photographs until the courtroom had cleared for the morning and only Judge Rednick was left alone in his chair.
I wish I could have photographed Assistant D.A. Erin Gisolfi, who was weighed down with files of paperwork that would break the back of an older person. Just lifting the box files and moving them from the counsel’s table to a luggage wheelie (or vice versa) requires lifting capabilities that need to be trained for in a gym.
Photo sent to columnist Dick Hubert by a tenant of an apartment managed by the Port Chester Housing Authority showing the condition of a bathroom floor.It was County D.A. Mimi Rocah’s Director of Public Affairs and Information Jin Whang who told me that her legal staff was at the mercy of a decrepit New York State Court system which has yet to computerize and was wasting millions in taxpayer dollars keeping untold boxes of file folders and documents in warehouses across the state. Digitization and computerization be damned.
I was also not able to photograph the local attorneys who make their living in the Rye Town courtroom waiting for cases to come up for their paid or (paid for by the County) indigent clients.
These good folks have been there since I first met them five years ago. One in particular, Agnes Fidelibus of Rye Brook, whom I vividly remembered for her striking couture and flaring white lengthy hair, let alone her articulate advocacy for her clients, even remembered not only my name, but took one look at me and guessed my age. I told her she hadn’t changed a whit in five years.
As for the defendants…
The names and faces of the tenants in eviction court are different from five years ago, but one thing about them hasn’t changed: they are almost uniformly Black and Hispanic.
Back in January, a Port Chester Housing Authority (PCHA) tenant stopped me in a local store at the cashier’s checkout and asked if she had seen me before. I identified myself as a columnist for this newspaper and she asked me to visit her and her friends in their PCHA apartments. Which I did.
I haven’t the space to tell her whole story, but the photo of disgraceful apartment conditions there is just one of the many she and her neighbors shared with me. And then they decided that anonymity was the better choice, and my phone calls and e-mails went unanswered. The woman who engaged me eventually told me she had been evicted for failure to pay back rent and was now living with a relative. A migrant Venezuelan family she had befriended and put up in a spare bedroom in her apartment free of charge for two years, unbeknownst to the PCHA, also had to find new living quarters.
In the courtroom June 12 were tenants who had back rent of $7,479, $17,682, and one who astoundingly owed $47,040.
Judge Rednick kept offering postponements when the evictees told him they’d work to find a solution.
How they will ever repay those amounts is beyond me. And beyond them.
The one bright spot
As we chatted while I was taking his photograph, Judge Rednick told me about a new law which might upend eviction cases in his courtroom.
He sent me a link to it, and I immediately contacted State Senator Shelley Mayer for further background. Here’s how she responded. Read it and cheer for some good news in this dreary landscape.
“In 2022, we passed a law, which I co-sponsored, to extend to rental tenants outside New York City the right to bring a special proceeding in a city, district and/or justice court against a landlord who failed to correct unsafe conditions. Prior to 2022, only rental tenants in NYC had the ability to bring such a case against a landlord. The 2022 law, which Governor Hochul signed, was modified slightly in 2023 with several technical changes and a requirement that the Office of Court Administration provide instructional materials in plain language in jurisdictions subject to the new law.
"I pushed for the original legislation because of the experiences of rental tenants in my district who had no ability to force their landlord to make necessary repairs, including when there were violations cited by the municipality. This law, and the subsequent clarifying law, made provisions uniform throughout New York State to provide this redress to rental tenants with dangerous conditions in their apartments or homes.
"I am hopeful this law gives local judges the authority--and the willingness—to force landlords to meet code and safety standards and allow tenants to bring these actions without fear of retaliation."
So now it’s up to the local bar, and the Rye Town judges, to enforce Mayer’s legislation and give tenants the opportunity to force landlords like the PCHA to clean up their apartments.
It may not help with back rent owed, but at least it may eliminate tenants’ frustrations with landlords who don’t repair what needs to be repaired.
And readers, the Rye Town Court’s dates and times for eviction court can be found at this website: https://www.townofryeny.com/departments/justice-court
If you have a few hours to spare and you want to get a sense of what really goes on in our community, pay a visit. You’ll get criminal and DUI cases as a bonus.
Some major local news updates
In my column last week, I reported that Democratic D.A. candidate Adeel Mirza had not replied with a firm interview date. Last Friday he announced he was withdrawing from the D.A. race, too late to get his name removed from the primary ballot. He also endorsed Susan Cacace’s opponent, William Wagstaff.
As for Cacace, she has now been endorsed by the woman she wants to succeed, Westchester County D.A. Mimi Rocah.
Close readers of last week’s column will not be surprised.
In the 16th District Congressional race for the Democratic nomination between County Executive George Latimer and incumbent Congressman Jamaal Bowman, the endorsement of Latimer by our former Congressman Mondaire Jones (now the Democratic candidate in the neighboring 17th District), and the ensuing outrage by Bowman’s Black supporters, begs for analysis. Watch this space for that analysis in future editions.
Dick Hubert, a retired television news producer-writer-reporter living in Rye Brook, has been honored with the Peabody Award, the DuPont Columbia Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Journalism Award.
Editor’s Note: This column, written by Dick Hubert, represents his opinion and not that of this newspaper.
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