Mayor Gearity's Repeal of ETPA is cruel and heartless

To Village of Ossining Residents,

I would like to put into perspective the recent actions of Ossining Village Mayor and Trustees Levin and Quezada to attempt to rescind the Emergency Tenant Protection Act (“ETPA”), adopted only last

September by the Ossining Village Board. The Board’s passage last week of a resolution to conduct a public hearing to discuss the dissolution of ETPA in Ossining is most troubling for so many reasons.

The very adoption of ETPA was the result of years of discussion and public dialogue in which renters of ETPA housing spoke about their personal and troubling experiences at the hands of unscrupulous landlords who ignored complaints of sub-standard apartments, experienced excessive rent increases and some cases faced retribution for their very desire to get what they were paying for. Some of those tenants were forced to leave their apartments and risked their home lives so that others could have protections they may never get. There is a dis-connect between public policy making and the personal suffering of those affected by changes in such policies.

The ETPA could not have been adopted absent a Board Resolution that a rental emergency (as defined by law) existed in Ossining. The vacancy study that was completed last summer more than illustrated the lack of rentals in the ETPA eligible properties to meet the threshold to declare the emergency. Yet, in the Resolution for a new public hearing, it is suggested that the shortage of rental apartments has somehow disappeared since last September. The notion that a program that has barely started has somehow solved the problem or has not been successful is both absurd and illogical. It’s hard to find any kind of apartment in Ossining, luxury, market rate or subsidized.

The Mayor and Trustees Levin and Quezada are totally misleading when they argue that ETPA is not needed since it won’t solve the problem of a lack of low-income housing. The passage of ETPA was never intended to create or provide low income rental housing, it was to prevent unabated and excessive rental increases and provide tenant protections.

The majority of properties affected by ETPA are market rate rentals. There is a difference between housing that is market rate (and affordable) and housing that is declared affordable by government mandate. Very few if any of the ETPA eligible units are affordable by mandate, the majority are market rate. Only through rezoning, repurposing of current housing and new construction can mandated affordable housing come into being. ETPA does not do that. What ETPA does do, with the enforcement capabilities of state law, is provide leases, reasonable annual increases in rents and tenant protections against retribution by landlords for complaints of building safety and maintenance. The Mayor and the Trustees know this.

What other reason would Mayor Gearity and Trustees Rika Levin and Manuel Quezada have to repeal ETPA so soon after its recent passage? They promise that Village government will enact legislation that will take the place of ETPA. In the many years since ETPA, no municipality has been able to even come close to the state mandated protections of this program. So all the tenants that now get the benefits of ETPA, including some getting leases for the first time and others having conditions improve, should just trust that it will be fine while village government ponders the impossible. In the absence of any Village approved legislation that would provide similar protections to ETPA, I can only see this as a punitive action that will only hurt those who lack political and economic power. Attempting to punish your political opponents for not seeing it your way, is one thing, but punishing the residents of ETPA rental housing by stripping them of their new-found protections is just cruel and heartless.

Mayor Victoria Gearity, in her inauguration speech, talked about understanding the need for us to listen and understand the needs of the parts of the community that don’t look like her. That was a commendable declaration, but to pivot from that and take away tenants’ rights provided by ETPA is contradictory to that notion. Guess who lives in ETPA housing? The very constituents that you hope to engage. The Mayor and the Trustees in support of the disabling of ETPA need to understand the real-life consequences of taking away these basic tenant rights to have a secure and stable home life. I ask them, Will you be there to talk to the children of families who are forced from the Ossining schools because the rent increases are too high, will you be there to explain to a senior citizen or disabled resident on a fixed income they have to leave their home? No, you won’t be there and you certainly will have no power to change the situation.

The Mayor claims in her letter to the editor last week that her election to office was a mandate to strip the rights of ETPA tenants. None of her Campaign materials makes any reference to its dissolution which makes her calling for its end completely disingenuous. This is a Mayor who won her Democratic primary by only 219 votes.

At the January 16 the Village of Ossining Legislative session, when Mayor Gearity and Trustees Levin and Quezada spoke before they took the vote approving the holding of the public hearing on February 6th , none of them would address the issue of the real-life suffering of the tenants without the protections of ETPA. Despite witnessing years of debate and testimony, how can they not understand the adverse effect this will have? When you’re playing with policy that effects people’s homes this is not the time to promise something you cannot deliver. This is one of the saddest times in the Village of Ossining’s political history and it will not be forgotten.

John Codman III

Citizen of the Village of Ossining & Former Village of Ossining Deputy Mayor