YORKVILLE

New state Supreme Court decision favors shareholder in dispute with board.

Boards need to enforce the rules – and consider providing kids with a safe place to play.

It’s your call: one median-priced Manhattan apartment, or 208,333 pints of Guinness Stout?

What does a cooperative need to prove when it sues a shareholder in landlord/tenant court for non-payment? These cases go to trial so rarely that people may not look at the proof the co-op must proffer.

But in 300 East 85th Housing Corp. v. Dropkin, the court considered the co-op's proofs and rendered a decision that is worth examining for several reasons.

Frieda and Howard Dropkin, shareholders at The America co-op at 300 East 85th Street, owe $13,000 in maintenance-payment arrears, the co-op board alleged in a court case decided late last month. Given the arrears and a couple of related issues, the board had moved to evict the couple. But, as the New York Law Journal reports, Judge Jack Stoller wasn't having any of it once he found the board couldn't explain how it calculated any of its shareholders' maintenance charges, let alone the Dropkins'. He also rejected the board's argument that the calculations didn't matter since the "voluntary payment doctrine" would have established the maintenance charge, noting the Dropkins had paid different amounts each month. The board's attorney told the Law Journal it was reviewing the decision to determine how to proceed.

A trio of New York City statutes instituted last year are designed to make it easier for co-op and condo boards and other building owners and managers to address the extreme-weather effects of climate change, as well as better prepare for emergencies generally. We've written about Local Law 110/2013, which requires, among other things, drinking-water stations that draw separate from the main water line; and Local Law 111/2013, which addresses the complicated rules that govern backup-power generators.

The third leg of this triangle is Local Law 109/2013, which helps make it easier for buildings to install flood barriers.

Recent news affecting co-op / condo buyers, sellers, boards and residents. Not a good week, this week. A failed gas line at Seward Park affected 400 apartments. A visitor leapt to her death from a Yorkville condominium, traumatizing residents. And even at an expensive Upper East Side condo, a penthouse-dweller is stuck in an elevator for over an hour without help arriving.