Rent Control Advocate Takes on Hoboken Landlords

A local rent control advocate filed briefs this week in her appeal of a superior court decision that overturned the results of a 2012 referendum on Hoboken’s existing rent control model. 

Cheryl Fallick, a member of the Hoboken Rent Control Board and the campaign manager for opponents of a November ballot initiative that sought to impose a vacancy de-control model in Hoboken, had initially been denied the ability to intervene in the case, but was granted that right on appeal last month. 

She believes Superior Court Judge Christine Farrington’s decision to overturn a vote that narrowly upheld rent control in its current form was made in error.

In February, Farrington overturned the results — which upheld current rent control protections by 52 votes — and called for a re-vote after a group of 15 property owners, with the support of the Mile Square Taxpayers Association, claimed nearly 200 residents who had been displaced by Superstorm Sandy and voted outside of Hoboken had been denied the right to vote on the public question because it did not appear on their provisional ballots.

"Unfortunately, voters who did this and appeared outside of Hoboken to vote, were not presented with a Hoboken ballot and therefore could only vote for the presidential and senate races," an email distributed at the time by Charles Gormally, the lawyer for the 15 contesting property owners, stated.

Upon review of the list of displaced Hoboken voters submitted by the challengers, however, Fallick said it’s clear that the majority were not eligible to vote in Hoboken.

“It took us a long time, but we got the names of the 114 people that were supposedly disenfranchised,” she said. “We found that all but 36 voted some place else because they lived some place else and we were able to prove this through the affirmation statements they filled out when they vote provisionally.”

Despite what Fallick calls the “obviously problematic” aspects of the submitted voter list, she said it went unquestioned by the state and county defendants named in MSTA’s challenge of the referendum results.

“Neither the defendants nor the judge challenged the flawed arguments or lack of legitimate evidence that the MSTA plaintiffs presented to the Court to support their motion to overturn the election,” she said in a statement released by the Hoboken Fair Housing Association in March. 

Fallick believes she was recently granted the right to intervene in the case, after originally being denied, because the new information she submitted about the list clearly demonstrates that the defendants tasked with defending the referendum results had failed to adequately do so. 

Convincing or not, the information Fallick gathered is not permissible in court. Appellate Court Judge Anthony Parillo denied her motion to add it to the record last month, meaning that on appeal a judge can only review the evidence already presented to the trial court before Fallick was granted permission to intervene in the case.

Gormally said he wouldn’t dignify Fallick’s claims that the disenfranchised voter list he submitted was flawed.

“My statement about that evidence is that it’s not evidence,” he said. “I wouldn’t glorify it by calling it evidence. It’s specifically barred from consideration in this case…all these things she’s contending are not part of the record. She can come in and argue that Farrington got it wrong, but she can’t do it by adding evidence that she created after the election.”

Gormally said Fallick is only fighting the trial court ruling because she knows that if the rent control question were put to the public again, as Farrington has ruled it should be, it would pass this time. 

“We’re confident that if an election is held and not interrupted by a superstorm, the vast majority of voters in Hoboken are going to adopt this ordinance,” Gormally said. “You couldn’t do any publicity before the election because of the storm. A lot of constituents were displaced because of the storm and we had this anomaly of people who voted not being presented with an equal ballot. All factors played into why it didn’t pass to begin with.”

He cited the defendants’ failure to fight Farrington’s ruling as evidence that justice had been served.

“Nothing suggests that Farrington got this wrong,” he said. “Obviously the state, county and city agree because none of them filed an appeal.”

Fallick, who is represented by Renee Steinhagen of the New Jersey Appleseed Public Interest Law Center, said she’s not deterred by the judge’s decision to deny introduction of her findings into the record because the submitted voter list itself is still fair game.

“That list, however it is used, is part of the record,” she said. “It can be questioned. The flaws on its face are part of the record.”

Barring a victory for Fallick that re-establishes the original election results, voters will decide the fate of rent control in Hoboken this November.