The Hotel That Owed Over $300,000 in Water Bills

Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll find out about the city’s efforts to collect on what it says are delinquent water bills. We’ll also see why a judge decided not to punish Donald Trump’s onetime fixer for fake legal citations concocted by an artificial intelligence program.

The Hotel Hayden promotes itself as “a buzz-worthy boutique for trendsetters, stylists and sophisticates.”

City officials found it buzz-worthy for something different — its large unpaid water bill.

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

The city says that the bill scofflaws have used six billion gallons without paying. That’s enough water to satisfy the city’s thirst for four full days, as well as its needs for teeth brushing, showering and toilet flushing.

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

In January, the city said that nearly one in four water customers was behind. Water shut-off warning letters, sent last month to 2,400 overdue accounts, brought in more than $3 million.

Still, Mayor Adams said on Wednesday, “A small percentage of customers incorrectly 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 shutting off their water.

In trying to collect the overdue bills, the city said it had put an emphasis on commercial properties like hotels, office buildings and retail spaces, even though officials said in January that roughly 85 percent of the unpaid bills were from residential properties. The city said the owners of the delinquent commercial properties had not responded to communications from the Environmental Protection Department, which runs the city’s water system. Nor had the owners of one-to-three-family homes.

Besides the Hotel Hayden, the department listed three other hotels that together owe nearly $897,000. The department said the Hotel Hayden’s debt stretched back four years, to when the pandemic began.

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

The agency said there had been a significant jump in delinquent accounts during the pandemic, both in how many fell behind on payments and in how much was owed. The total of delinquent payments nearly doubled, the agency said, to $1.2 billion, an amount so large 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 its 19 reservoirs — is directly paid for by users.

The agency began an amnesty program last year that helped 100,000 account holders trim their water bill debts and avoid some $22 million in interest payments. In all, the amnesty program brought in nearly $105 million, the city said.

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

The city said there are penalties for a water shut-off that go beyond a $1,000 restoration fee. Buildings where water is turned off could be cited for violating building and fire codes as well as fire regulations. The city also warned that not having water could invalidate a building owner’s insurance policy and could damage the heating system.

Weather

Enjoy a breezy, sunny day with a high in the low 40s. At night it will be mostly clear, with temperatures dropping to the high 20s.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until Sunday (Purim).

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

At issue were citations in a motion on Cohen’s behalf — citations that referred to cases made up by an artificial intelligence program. Cohen used the program while assisting his lawyer, David Schwartz, who cited the bogus cases in the motion he filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan.

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

The judge wrote that it would have been “downright irrational” for Cohen to have given Schwartz bogus citations “knowing they were fake,” given the chances that prosecutors or the court could figure out that the citations were not real, “with potentially serious adverse consequences for Cohen himself.” Cohen said in a sworn declaration in December that he had not realized that Schwartz “would drop the cases into his submission wholesale without even confirming that they existed.”

The motion they were working on sought an early end to the court’s supervision of Cohen’s conviction on 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 last fall at Trump’s civil fraud trial. Cohen’s “willingness to come forward and provide truthful accounts demonstrates an exceptional level of remorse and a commitment to upholding the law,” Schwartz wrote.

But Judge Furman said that Cohen’s testimony in the civil trial “actually provides reason to deny his motion, not to grant it.” Judge Furman said that when Cohen was on the stand, Cohen admitted that he lied in pleading guilty to the tax evasion, something he has since said he did not commit.

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

METROPOLITAN diary