To the Editor:
Re: Phylis Salom’s Letter to the editor, June 22.
In her recent letter to your paper, Phylis Salom berates Dave Silver for expressing his fears for a costly rise in maintenance fees if Southbridge Towers (S.B.T.) chooses to privatize. She accuses Downtown Express of unfairly favoring anti-privatizers’ mail. It is obvious to me that your newspaper has been very fair in printing letters on both sides of this thorny issue.
She claims that no former Mitchell-Lama (State or City-backed) co-op ever went
private and ever had more than a few dollars added to their maintenance fees (a
combination of rent, gas, electricity and water costs). Yet Seward Park (ex-Mitchell-Lama co-op) is now facing a yearly ongoing $3-million deficit. At East Midtown Plaza, 90 percent of its people voted for the start of the process of privatization — and now, finally, after spending over $9-million on Red Herring prospectuses, voted AGAINST privatization.
Maybe their people began to do the math.
We at S.B.T. face, after privatizing, a likely $28-million real property transfer
tax, plus a big increase in our yearly real estate taxes of about $9 million. Oh,
our Board of Directors readily admits this.
So, how can Ms. Salom say there will not be a major increase in our privatized maintenance fee?
Laurence Vide
