Dylan Sloan photo
Parisi, outside Wooster Square apt.: Rent’s too damn high.
A Wooster Square woman facing a $150 monthly rent hike has appealed to state court — putting on trial, so to speak, the way New Haven’s Fair Rent Commission handles landlord-tenant disputes.
That renter is Pamela Parisi.
The 66-year-old Lyon Street resident has been engaged in a years-long housing fight with her Guilford-based landlord, Marc Nadeau.
On Jan. 4, Parisi’s attorneys — J.L. Pottenger, Jr. and Richard Tenenbaum of the Yale Law School’s Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization, along with several student interns from that program — filed an administrative appeal in state housing court of a recent decision issued by the Fair Rent Commission.
That’s the city body charged with resolving rent disputes between landlords and tenants.
Thomas Breen pre-pandemic photo
Fair Rent Commission Executive Director Otis Johnson, at a 2019 hearing.
In the administrative appeal, the tenant’s attorneys allege that the Fair Rent Commission failed to follow a number of city laws before issuing a decision in December that Parisi’s rent should increase to $1,200 per month. (See here for an article about that public hearing and for extensive background on the case.)
Parisi and her attorneys argue that the city commission rushed through the December hearing without honoring the tenant’s legal rights to present her full testimony and evidence and to cross-examine her landlord.
The appeal also claims that the city commission failed to swear in witnesses and take all testimony under oath, as is required under city law; that it failed to consider written submissions and evidence provided at hearing when resolving the dispute; and that it refused to let Parisi’s attorneys argue their case that the appropriate legal standard of review for Fair Rent cases should be whether or not the rent increase is “fair and equitable,” not “harsh and unconscionable,” when applied to elderly or disabled tenants.
“The commission’s procedures and order violate Ms. Parisi’s due process rights and are arbitrary, unlawful, and otherwise an abuse of discretion,” Parisi’s attorneys assert.
They call on the state court to invalidate the commission’s rent increase order, to remand the proceedings back to the commission for “additional fact finding and entry of a new order,” and to instruct the commission to follow the various laws and suggestions that the tenant’s attorneys say were broken.
Fair Rent Commission Executive Director Otis Johnson did not respond to a request for comment by the publication time of this article. City Assistant Corporation Counsel Kevin Casini, who is representing the city in this state housing court case, declined to comment on the matter pending a ruling from state Superior Court Judge Claudia Baio.
“Rendering” Animal Fat
Cisco web-video picture
Nadeau’s attorney, Steve Jacobs (pictured), did get to weigh in on the matter during a Tuesday afternoon virtual housing court hearing before Judge Baio.
Jacobs argued on Tuesday and in a motion to dismiss filed with the state court that Parisi’s appeal should be thrown out on the simple grounds that she and her attorneys waited too long to file it in the first place.
City law explicitly states that anyone looking to appeal a decision by the Fair Rent Commission may file such an appeal with state housing court “within 10 days after the rendering of the decision in question.”
“It’s not 10 days from when the notice is published,” Jacobs said. “It’s not 10 days from the date when it is mailed or received. It’s 10 days from when the decision is rendered.”
The law does not explicitly define “rendered.” A “common understanding” of that word — as expressed in case law and in dictionaries — should lead the court to find that “rendered” refers to when a decision is handed down and made apparent to both parties, Jacobs argued.
“You render fat at the time the animal is boiled,” he said. “You don’t render fat at some later time, when the fat arrives at the store or you bring the fat home to your house.
“Rendering happens when the decision is made, when it comes out of the mouth of the person making the decision.”
According to that definition, he continued, the $150 rent increase decision was made during the Fair Rent Commission public hearing on Dec. 15.
“The plaintiff’s appeal was not filed until January 7, 2021,” he wrote in a memorandum supporting Nadeau’s motion to dismiss, “23 days after the rendering of the decision on the record, 17 days after the publication of the Notice of Finding, and 12 days after the purported date on which the written decision was received by plaintiff’s counsel.”
“The appeal was untimely,” Jacobs said remotely on Tuesday, “and the appeal should be dismissed.”
Alternate Math
Adam Kinkley (pictured), a Yale Law School student intern with the Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization, took up the cause of the timeliness of the filing during Tuesday’s hearing.
Arguing on behalf of Parisi, he said relevant case law shows that the appeal period should not start on Dec. 15 — when the commission issued a “preliminary disposition” on the matter — but rather when “the aggrieved party is sent meaningful notice of the decision from which they may appeal.”
He said that the commission’s Dec. 15 deliberation and decision included no “factual basis for its decision, the legal standard it applied, nor did it resolve material outstanding factual disputes.”
If the appeal period began on Dec. 15, then Parisi would have had to file her appeal no later than Dec. 26 — which he said is the same day that her counsel received the commission’s written order. “Ms. Parisi would have had no way of cognizing the factual and legal grounds for an appeal based on the vote in the Dec. 15 hearing.”
Instead, he argued, Dec. 23 — when a “meaningful notice” was sent to the parties — should mark the start of the appeal clock.
Jan. 1 was a holiday. Jan. 2 was a Saturday. That means that Parisi should have had until Jan. 4 to file her appeal while still technically within the 10-day appeal window, Kinkley argued.
Kinkley also disputed Jacobs’s assertion that the appeal was actually filed on Jan. 7, which is when it was uploaded to the state court docket. He said the return of service included at the end of the administrative appeal document shows that a state marshal hand-delivered the citation, summons, and appeal to the city clerk’s office and to Nadeau on Jan. 4.
Jacobs said that Kinkley “argued well and persuasively” — then pushed back on the notion that Parisi needed any more information than what was announced on Dec. 15 in order to file an appeal.
“The issues before the Fair Rent Commission was simply whether the proposed rent increase was fair or not fair,” he said. “There would have been no reason to articulate the basis for that. It was a simple decision that had to be made. Was it fair or not fair in light of what was presented to the Fair Rent Commission at that time?”
The commissioners subsequently made their decision and announced it on the record, in the presence of both parties and their respective counsels, he said.
Jacobs said the fight over this appeal right now has less to do with Nadeau, and more to do with the 10-day timeline specifically set out in city law.
“If the plaintiff doesn’t like that, then the plaintiff ought to petition the Board of Alders to amend the ordinance to allow for a longer period of time,” he said.
Judge Baio thanked both parties for their thorough and well-prepared arguments and briefs, and promised to deliver soon a decision on whether or not to dismiss the case for alleged untimeliness.