The hotel that owed more than $300,000 in water bills

Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll learn more about the city’s efforts to collect delinquent water bills. We’ll also see why a judge decided not to punish Donald Trump’s one-time fixer for bogus legal citations concocted by an artificial intelligence program.

Hotel Hayden promotes itself as “a boutique of choice for trendsetters, stylists and sophisticates.”

City officials thought it was worth it because of something else: the large unpaid water bill.

The city said the hotel owed $372,026, the largest delinquent balance among 2,400 chronically delinquent accounts — and enough for Mayor Eric Adams to come by Wednesday. He placed a water shut-off sign on the front door of the hotel on West 28th Street as the city moved to collect a total of more than $102 million from late owners.

The city says the bill’s drafters used six billion gallons without paying for it. That’s enough water to satisfy the city’s thirst for four full days, as well as the need to brush teeth, shower and flush toilets.

Looked at another way, the daily average for water use is approximately 191 gallons for a single-family home and 142 gallons per unit for a multi-family home. The city charges $11.63 for every 100 cubic feet of water (748 gallons), including a fee for wastewater services. That works out to about a cent per gallon.

In January, the city said nearly one in four water customers were behind. Water shutoff warning letters sent to 2,400 delinquent accounts last month raised more than $3 million.

Still, Mayor Adams said Wednesday, “A small percentage of customers have wrongly made the mistake of thinking they could get away with stiffing their fellow New Yorkers.” He said the city was willing to work with them “one last time” before they shut off their water.

In an effort to collect on the delinquent bills, the city said it had focused on commercial properties such as hotels, office buildings and retail spaces, even though officials said in January that about 85 percent of the unpaid bills came from residential properties. The city said the owners of the delinquent commercial properties had not responded to messages from the Department of Environmental Protection, which manages the city’s water system. This also applies to owners of one- to three-family homes.

In addition to Hotel Hayden, the department listed three other hotels collectively owed nearly $897,000. The department said Hotel Hayden’s debts stretched back four years to when the pandemic began.

A woman who answered a call to Hotel Hayden on Wednesday said no one there could talk about the bill. A call to Fortuna Realty Group, which owns Hotel Hayden, was not returned.

The agency said there had been a significant jump in the number of delinquent accounts during the pandemic, both in terms of the number of payments in arrears and the amount still owed. Total delinquencies nearly doubled, the agency said, to $1.2 billion, an amount so large that it “threatened a service the city could not survive without.” The water system – the city’s 15,000 miles of water and sewer lines and 19 reservoirs – is paid for directly by users.

The agency launched an amnesty program last year that helped 100,000 account holders reduce their water bill debt and avoid about $22 million in interest payments. In total, the amnesty program has raised nearly $105 million, the city said.

The agency also awarded $8 million in billing credits to accounts that had participated in a state program for low-income homeowners.

The city said there are fines for a water shutoff that go beyond the $1,000 repair fee. Buildings where the water is turned off may be cited for violating building codes and fire regulations. The city also warned that the lack of water could void a building owner’s insurance policy and damage the heating system.

Weather

Enjoy a breezy, sunny day with highs in the low 40s. At night it is mainly clear and temperatures drop to above twenty degrees.

ALTERNATE PARKING

In effect until Sunday (Purim).

It was embarrassing and unfortunate, the judge said, but it was not worth punishing Michael Cohen, the former fixer for former President Donald Trump.

These were quotes in a motion on behalf of Cohen – quotes that referred to things made up by an artificial intelligence program. Cohen used the program while assisting his attorney, David Schwartz, who cited the bogus cases in the motion he filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan.

Judge Jesse Furman said Wednesday that he had accepted Cohen’s explanation that Cohen did not understand how the Google Bard program worked. Cohen had said he did not intend to mislead Schwartz, who the judge found had not acted in bad faith.

The judge wrote that it would have been “downright irrational” for Cohen to have given Schwartz false quotes “knowing they were fake,” given the chance that prosecutors or the court could find out the quotes weren’t real, “with the potential serious adverse consequences. consequences for Cohen himself.” Cohen said in an affidavit in December that he had not realized that Schwartz “would drop the cases in their entirety without even confirming that they existed.”

The motion they were working on sought an early end to the court’s oversight of Cohen’s conviction for tax evasion and campaign finance violations he committed on Trump’s behalf. Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 and served time in prison.

Schwartz noted in the motion that Cohen had testified for two days at Trump’s civil fraud trial last fall. Cohen’s “willingness to come forward and make truthful statements demonstrates an exceptional level of remorse and commitment to upholding the law,” Schwartz wrote.

But Judge Furman said Cohen’s testimony in the civil trial “in fact provides grounds for denying his request, not granting it.” Judge Furman said that when Cohen was on the stand, Cohen admitted that he lied when he pleaded guilty to tax evasion, something he has since said he did not commit.

Cohen will be a key witness for the prosecution in Trump’s first criminal trial, set to begin next month in Manhattan, because Cohen was involved in the hush-money deal with a porn actress at the center of that case. His credibility will undoubtedly be an issue.

METROPOLITAN diary

Fruit stand

Dear Diary:

I was walking towards Grand Central on a warm August day when I passed a fruit stand.

An anguished man in a suit tried to buy one apple from the seller, who in turn tried to persuade the man to buy more.