Ex-police captain, ex-alder, current hearing officer Gerald Antunes: $59K in fines approved. LCI Executive Director Liam Brennan: Also, the landlord hasn’t paid real estate taxes for this property in three years. The building at 781 Whalley on Friday. Yikes. A Livable City Initiative (LC I) hearing officer approved the Elicker administration’s request on Thursday to impose $59,000 in anti-blight fines on the owner of a long-dilapidated building at the “gateway” to Westville. “The owners of 781 Whalley Ave. should be ashamed,” Westville landlord-developer-activist Thea Buxbaum said on behalf of a dozen neighbors who showed up to City Hall to support the city’s proposed fines. “Their repeated demand for an astronomical price for a severely blighted property, while allowing it to decay year after year, is not neutral behavior. It is extractive, it is harmful, and it should be met with the highest allowable fines under code.” Westville/Amity/Beverly Hills Alder Richard Furlow, who sat next to Buxbaum during Thursday’s hearing, said the same. “It’s a disaster,” he said about the building. It’s open to trespass and consistently tagged with graffiti. “The only thing we can do is apply fines,” said Furlow, who is also the Board of Alders’ majority leader. “My hope is we will take more drastic measures” in the future. But for now, the city should apply the maximum fines available. Ultimately, the LCI hearing officer presiding over the case — retired former police captain and former Quinnipiac Meadows Alder Gerald Antunes — agreed. “Let it be written, let it be said,” Antunes said as he signed off on the $59,000 in fines. Such was the outcome of the latest quasi-judicial proceedings of a LCI volunteer hearing officer at City Hall. As of October 2024, the city had nine such mayoral appointees who preside over hearings that can result in hefty fines for landlords who are cited by the city for unsafe or unsightly properties. (Allison Jacobs recently stepped down as a LCI hearing officer to become the city’s next top lawyer.) If landlords do not pay these hearing officer-approved fines, LCI can seek a civil judgment in state court. One of the New Haven’s largest landlords, meanwhile, has taken the Elicker administration to court to contest the validity of more than $400,000 in anti-blight fines levied against them through this process. That case is still before a state judge. The outcome of that case could have bearing on how the city handles issuing such fines going forward. $1K Fine Per Day For 59 Days LCI Neighborhood Specialist Ray Jackson: “The community was being disrespected.” At Thursday’s proceedings in a second-floor meeting room at City Hall, Antunes heard LCI’s pitch to fine 50 Fitch LLC — a holding company controlled by local landlord Sim Levenhartz — a total of $59,000 for all of the anti-blight violations that have racked up at 50 Fitch St. / 781 Whalley Ave. That two-building property at the corner of Whalley and Fitch used to be home to the Community Action Agency. It’s been empty for the past two decades, and has been owned by Levenhartz’s company since 2019. In July 2022, the City Plan Commission approved the landlord’s plans to revive the decrepit property into 245 new apartments. That redevelopment has yet to take place. According to Buxbaum, Furlow, LCI Neighborhood Specialist Raymond Jackson, and LCI Executive Director Liam Brennan — all of whom spoke at Thursday’s hearing — the property has only fallen into worse and worse disrepair since then. During a presentation to Antunes at Thursday’s hearing, Jackson said that the propoerty is in violation of a number of provisions of the city’s anti-blight code. It’s consistently covered in graffiti; a car crashed into the side of the building, leaving part of the structure looking like “it’s crumbling;” the property is open to trespass, including through an open back door and inconsistently boarded-up windows; it has a a broken fence; it’s beset by discarded vehicles and accumulated trash; and it’s been the subject of multiple complaints from neighbors who feel like the property’s current condition means that “the community was being disrespected.” LCI attorney Sinclair Williams and Jackson told Antunes that LCI sent a notice of violation to the landlord’s office at 315 Front St. on Oct. 15, with an order to fix the relevant problems in 10 days. That repair work didn’t occur, and so LCI sent a civil citation to the landlord’s office on Dec. 1. LCI also sent a notice of Thursday’s hearing to that same 315 Front St. address. Williams explained to Antunes that the $59,000 proposed fines represents $1,000 in penalties per day for each day that has passed since the civil citation went out on Dec. 1. While no landlord representative was present at City Hall for Thursday’s hearing, Furlow and Jackson said that they had recently visited the 781 Whalley / 50 Fitch site with company representative Jonathan Perlich and had talked about their long-standing concerns with the state of the property. Furlow also described recently stopping by the site and finding that a back door was unlocked and open. Antunes asked if any homeless people have been squatting in the building. Jackson said he’s not sure. Brennan also noted that the landlord hasn’t paid property taxes for this building for the past three years — racking up roughly $300,000 in back taxes. Brennan said that the city has filed lis pendens on the city’s land records database for two of those three years’ worth of missed taxes. He said the city is working on a tax foreclosure lawsuit now. “As a gateway to our neighborhood, the building does not whisper neglect. It shouts decline,” Buxbaum read from a comment she had prepared for a group of Westville neighbors at Thursday’s hearing. “Students who should feel safe walking from Southern Connecticut State University avoid Fitch Street altogether. This is not theoretical harm. This is measurable disinvestment.” Antunes concluded the hearing by thanking LCI and the Westville neighbors for their presentation. He said that, when he was a police captain, his priority was serving the community. Same goes for when he was an alder. He said he keeps that community-service mission in mind, too, in his new capacity as a hearing officer. Landlord Rep: “$59K Is A Significant Amount Of Money” In a phone interview with the Independent after Thursday’s hearing, Perlich identified himself as a “quasi-owner’s representative” for the 781 Whalley / Fitch St. property. He said that he did not know Thursday’s hearing was taking place. If he did, he said, he would have shown up to present the landlord’s side. “I don’t think anyone can negate that $59,000 is a significant amount of money,” he said about the fines. Perlich told the Independent that he sympathizes with neighbors’ frustrations with the building. He said that the owner is currently looking to sell the property or bring on a new investor to help make a 2022-approved residential redevelopment plan actually happen. “There’s no commercial use for it at present,” Perlich said about 781 Whalley. “It’s slated to be demolished. Rightly or wrongly, there’s not repairs being made to the building given that context,” though the landlord has taken “best efforts” to “ensure that graffiti is covered in the most timely manner.” Perlich emphasized that he is not the property’s owner, but that he would pass along the news of the hearing-officer-approved fines — and community complaints aired at Thursday’s hearing — to the owner. “We fully acknowledge there is graffiti there at least once a week,” he said. “We paint it over once a week.” He said the landlord has worked to repair damage caused by the car that crashed into the building, and has installed “new coverings” at the “base level” to try to secure it. He added that the building has cameras, which have caught people performing graffiti — but because those people’s faces have been uncovered, it’s been difficult to identify the culprits. Perlich said that there are “several parties” interested in buying or otherwise investing in the property to help make the 245-apartment plan a reality. “It’s a pretty complex project, being so close to the river,” he said. In the landlord’s defense, he noted that the 781 Whalley building has been vacant for two decades, and the current landlord has owned the property for only the past five-plus years. “Immediately, it was pursued as a development site,” he said. But, the landlord is “not currently ready to move forward with the development.” Perlich expressed interest in appealing Thursday’s fines, if possible. He also said that a “more proactive use” of $59,000 could be “showcasing a repair plan, maintenance plan, beautification, whatever deemed warranted,” instead of having that amount go towards anti-blight fines. Perlich said some of his main takeaways from finding out about Thursday’s fines from this reporter are: “We’ve got an asset that is being viewed by the community as a detriment, as a risk, as not a good look for Westville, for New Haven, and I don’t believe ownership would ever want something to represent” them in that way. He expressed confidence that the property owner “would want to take available options to work with stakeholders to rectify” the problems identified by the city. “I certainly wish I knew” about Thursday’s hearing in advance, Perlich said, “and would have loved to represent that [perspective] to the community.” The post Landlord Fined $59K For Westville Eyesore appeared first on New Haven Independent. ...read more read less