This newsletter explores the emerging legal topics and issues affecting the condominium and cooperative services industry. Thought-leading attorneys from Moritt Hock & Hamroff’s Condominium and Cooperative Services Practice Group share their legal insight, experience and best practices on this rapidly evolving area of law.
A Brief Stay Of Execution For Buildings Required To File Local Law 97 Reports
If you reside in a building subject to the emissions reporting requirements of Local Law 97, your building hopefully will have already filed its first building emissions report by the time you read this newsletter.
As we have discussed previously, every so-called “covered building” must file these reports every year by May 1st, beginning this year (i.e., May 1, 2025). Failure to timely file these reports will subject your building to draconian monthly fines of $0.50 per square foot – meaning that a 100,000 square foot building could be liable for fines of $50,000 for each month they do not file their reports.
However, if your building has not yet filed, all hope is not (yet) lost. First, there is a statutory grace period of two months (until June 30th) during which the DOB will not issue fines for failure to file.
In addition, on April 21, 2025, the DOB announced that covered building owners “may request a LL97 deadline extension to August 29, 2025 by submitting the LL97 Extension Request ticket on the LL97 Reporting Portal. and paying the filing fee. Once granted, the LL97 extension will also extend the deadline for benchmarking compliance to August 29, 2025.”
Although four additional months is obviously much better than nothing, it is imperative that delinquent covered buildings focus on completing the Local Law 97 emissions report immediately, because the requirements and certifications needed to complete the filing are extensive.
If you are not sure if your building is covered by these filing requirements, or whether it has completed its filing, or whether you have done what is necessary to get more time to file, then you should contact counsel immediately.
Planning Co-op/Condo Construction Projects Under The New Administration
We try to focus on current events in this newsletter, and there is nothing more topical right now than the current national administrtion's policies - including but not limited to its aggressive initiatives on tariffs and immigration - and their potential impacts on the economy.
We are particularly focused on the question of how these policies may affect co-op and condo buildings. When one considers that imported construction materials may become prohibitively expensive (if not completely unavailable), or that the construction labor force may be considerably reduced by policies targeting the immigrant population, it is not hard to imagine that large capital improvement or other construction projects may soon become impossible to perform at or close to previous rates.
And that is a generous way of putting it, not least because co-op and condo construction projects have already been facing unprecedented challenges, from supply chain disruptions left over from the pandemic era to the collapse of the insurance market for umbrella policies.
Under these difficult circumstances, we are being asked for ways to help our clients get projects on the books and underway as soon as possible, before conditions may worsen. One suggestion we have made is to allow counsel to review the project specifications even before bidding is conducted. This is not to increase legal fees for the sake of it. On the contrary, in our experience, the more input that counsel is allowed to provide at an early stage, the more likely it is that costly and time-consuming problems can be avoided.
For example, with the insurance markets being as they are, we have seen scenarios on multiple occasions in which a board will select a contractor, and go far down the road with preparing agreements and plans, only to find out at the last minute that the contractor does not have (and cannot get) the insurance required by the building’s own carriers. The board then has to go back and start the process all over, wasting months and tens of thousands of dollars.
Having counsel incorporate the building’s insurance requirements into the bid package can help set contractor expectations and avoid false starts. Similarly, if the bid specifications include other potentially contentious terms that the board intends to include in the final agreement, such as broad warranty requirements or liquidated damages provisions for late completion, then the contractor can plan accordingly – and in any event cannot later complain that they were not aware of these expectations. This too can avoid contentious, expensive, and protracted negotiations on protections that are important to the board.
It goes without saying that modest steps like this will not themselves counteract the larger forces at play in the national economy. Nevertheless, and regardless of the economic background at any time, it always makes sense to have counsel review bid specifications, on the principle that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Florida Legislature Passes Comprehensive Condo Reform Package
Although Moritt Hock’s Condominium & Cooperative Services practice group is primarily based in New York, our Florida office also has a thriving practice advising Florida community association clients. As most readers are aware, the collapse of the Champlain Towers South condominium complex in Surfside, Florida in 2021 led to a wave of reform efforts nationwide. In Florida, those efforts have culminated in legislation known as House Bill 913, a comprehensive package of governance, financial, and safety reforms which will likely transform the way community associations are managed in Florida. HB 913 passed the Florida legislature on April 30, 2025, and has been sent to Governor DeSantis for signature, and, if enacted, will come into effect on July 1, 2025.
Evan Rosenberg of our Florida office has prepared a bulletin, accessible here, describing the key provisions of the legislation.
