Proposed rent increases are supposed to balance a building's income and expenses, but the task force contends that "the projected deficit is a pure fiction" concocted with "unexplained expenses and creative accounting practices."

Elliot Ashrey, assistant director of the management bureau of the State Division of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR), said the agency gave Westview two more weeks.  As a result, the DHCR rent orders will not be issued until sometime in March, he said this week.

Ashrey chaired the rent determination conferences for the two buildings on February 8.  Under the Mitchell-Lama middle-income housing program, the State sets the rent every two years, matching the buildings' income and expenses.

Kenneth Miller, DHCR's site representative for Roosevelt Island, said that Westview and Island House are "totally independent as far as rent determination," but that the division feels it is in the best interests of all residents to handle the orders together.  Thus, Island House also gets a two-week reprieve.

The State is proposing rent increases of about $20 per room; the housing company initially asked for about $90.  Ultimately, the decision is made by the DHCR commissioner, Joseph B. Lynch.

How much bearing the added Westview review will have on the proceedings is impossible to tell, because the survey in question dates to 1994, making it "not relevant to today," said Opher Pail, who chairs the Westview Task Force.  He said he would, nevertheless, send the State his response this week.

Pail had sought the report as a way of evaluating the management company's request for $1.37 million in 2001-03 for its replacement reserve requirement, a projection that was not altered in the analysis done by Westview's accountant for the rent determination hearing.

Pail, who had based much of his case for lower rent on detailed studies of the building's energy use and roofing costs, said he was "very disappointed at the way the hearing went."  One of his key presenters, Island resident Goran Jovanovic, senior project manager for Facade Maintenance Design, was cut short by Ashrey when he tried to discuss his roof assessment report.  It appeared at the time that Ashrey, who was trying to move things along, viewed Jovanovic's statement as a sales presentation.

Miller said the State requires physical condition surveys only once every 10 years because they are very expensive to do: "You're going through the entire building system, totally."

Westview resident Leon Lowder, an accountant who has been helping Pail, expressed frustration at the State and management company's lack of documentation.  "We can't seem to get a spreadsheet or cost analysis out of them," he said. "There's no cost projections for capital improvements."  Lowder said he had not been able to put his hands on the "hard-core details" of costs for such things as appliances, or plans for energy savings, despite considerable effort.  He even spent a whole day at Belson & Associates, the management company, looking at the roof contract and other materials.

But after spending a lot of time in the search for information, Lowder said, he concluded that the tenants simply were not getting "the detailed explanation they need to make an informed judgment" on the rent. "I don't think there would be any upset tenants if there were transparency" on the cost side.

Lowder characterized Westview's next step as a formal letter, for the record, "to let them know we're protesting this."