NEW YORK CITY

Our bags were gone. 

My fiancé, Mike, and I had come home after having dinner at my parents' house. While he was parking, I took a few bags of groceries upstairs to our sixth-floor walk-up apartment and left a suitcase and another bag of groceries in the lobby for Mike to bring up when he came in.

But by the time he arrived — only a brief 10 minutes later — the bags had disappeared. After knocking on a few doors and finding that no one had seen or heard anything, we realized that our bags had been stolen — from our locked lobby!

New York City has extended its deadline for property owners and managers to provide their buildings' 2013 energy-benchmarking data, following a cyberattack late last month at the U.S. government website where that information is entered into a database. Buildings falling under the benchmarking requirements now have until May 31. However, buildings wishing to use the government's spreadsheet template for entering information into that "Portfolio Manager" database, rather than entering information manually, have only until May 15 due to the planned release of an upgraded database.

Marijuana is becoming legal, to various extents, in a lot of places. Some states such as New Jersey and California allow if for medical purposes. Colorado just plain allows it. Some predict that sooner or later it will pretty much just be legal, basically everywhere.

The question is whether condo and co-op boards will be able to ban marijuana in instances where the state says its legal. Will a board be able to just say no? The answer is not so cut and dry.

How would you like to make sales dry up in your building? Or guarantee you'll lose every challenge to your authority as a board? What if you couldn't charge assessments, collect flip taxes or go after people who were in arrears? Nutty, right? Well, not so nutty if you're one of those condo or co-op boards that don't keep minutes.

Very soon there will be no more No. 6 heating oil. By June 2015, buildings in the city will not be able to burn the smog-producing fuel. Lots of buildings have already switched to cleaner-burning No. 2 or No. 4 oil, or to natural gas. But there are plenty of buildings where co-op and condo boards are still wrestling with what to do next. If your cooperative or condominium is one of them, which path is right for your particular situation?

Rising insurance rates might be unavoidable, but there are steps condo and co-op boards can take to keep control of runaway rates and prepare for the unavoidable increases. Here are three simple steps every building should contemplate.

A bill has been introduced in New York's City Council that would substantially impair a co-op board's rights to approve prospective apartment purchasers. 

On very short notice, a hearing on the bill — Int. No. 188 — has been scheduled for Tuesday, April 30, at 1 p.m. We understand that the bill is being strongly supported by the real estate broker community. However, we recommend and encourage you and your fellow co-op board members and managers to promptly reach out to your City Council representatives and express your views in opposition to the bill.

Portions of the New York State Labor Law were enacted to protect workers injured on construction projects. They allow an injured worker to sue the owner and general contractor even if they did not cause the accident. (One part of it is Labor Law 240, colloquially called "Scaffold Law.")

Under the provisions of Labor Law 240, if a worker injures himself in a fall the cooperative (but not the shareholder) may face liability for a claim. Accordingly, all construction projects at co-ops should anticipate a personal injury lawsuit and devise a plan. Proper planning involves adequate insurance coverage and indemnity agreements. These obligations should be set forth in the contracts entered into with the contractors, and in the alteration agreement.

Most co-op boards know about Labor Law 240 in the context of renovations on buildings. This is the law that makes owners, contractors and their agents liable for injuries to workers who fall from a height. It is also known as the "Scaffold Law." However, falling from a height can include a wide range of causes. It can include when a worker stands on a box to install a light fixture and falls. Most shareholders would be surprised to learn that it can also apply in some instances to renovations in their apartments.