Longtime Condop President Reflects on 40 Years of Building Upkeep and Shareholder Issues

For nearly four decades, Gerald Ross has been offering service with a smile at his Upper West Side condop. The Ontario, Canada native, who earned an MBA and law degree at the University of Michigan, started practicing law in New York in 1968, and at age 82 is still practicing today at his firm, Fryer and Ross. He spoke with Habitat about his long history as president at 160 West End Ave. — one of eight 29-story, 450-plus unit buildings known as Lincoln Towers — and the many challenges along the way.

In on the ground floor. I moved into the building back in 1973, 13 years before all of Lincoln Towers was converted to a condop. About half of the residents, including myself, wanted to buy our units, and we worked for two years to negotiate the terms with the sponsor. I was very involved with that, which made me a logical candidate for president when we had our first elections. The board’s biggest challenge initially was earning the trust of the shareholders, which we try to do with constant communication and trying to manage the building’s business carefully. We don’t do this by ourselves. We’ve always had excellent advisors — including the same accounting firm and management — over the years and have had the good sense to follow their advice. Thanks to our superintendent, we have an outstanding staff of 14 porters, doormen and handymen. Our standing wisecrack is that our guys don’t even know their job descriptions, they just help each other and our residents.

Area of focus. There are no formal committees, but each of our seven board members specializes in one area to some degree. In addition to building maintenance, mine is shareholder issues. Despite our size, they're rare, and we try to deal with them early on in an impartial way so we don't have little problems become big problems. The worst ones were a shareholder who accused the doorman of stealing her dry cleaning when it turned out her clothes had been delivered to the wrong apartment, and a shareholder who verbally abused the staff — yelling, swearing, calling them names. We sent her a 31F letter, which refers to the clause in the proprietary lease that gives the board the right to determine whether conduct is inappropriate and that one could be evicted if the behavior doesn’t stop. Used sparingly, that letter solves most  problems. Only twice in 37 years have we had to start legal proceedings to terminate a shareholder’s lease. 

Facade success story. Our last FISP inspection found that we were missing a number of wall ties — metal strips that hold the outside brick to the inside wall. Based on the engineer’s open probes at various spots, the report said we had to replace all 75,000 ties, which would cost $4 million. We wanted a more exact way of detecting the problems and found a second engineer who used a metal detector. The conclusion was we only needed to put in 7,500 extra ties, which brought the price down to about $1 million.

Money matters. The last maintenance increase — ours tend to be lower than the average at Lincoln Towers — was 3%. We have a $12 million revenue stream, which has consistently covered our expenses. Our easiest board meeting of the year is the budget meeting, which takes about 30 minutes, but that’s after weeks of hard work by our manager and our accountant to come up with a zero-loss figure. There’s about $6 million in reserves, which we fund with mortgage refinancing so we don’t have to do assessments. We’re about to borrow $5 million because we have a HVAC project coming up after we complete the facade repairs. We buy steam from ConEd to heat our water and have two electrical compressors that chill water, which is pumped through the apartments to the air-conditioner fan coils in each apartment. The riser pipes are beginning to get thin and need replacing, and we have to decide if we want to stick to a water-based system or install heat pumps under each window. Our problem is getting reliable information about large heat pumps that would heat and cool a building our size effectively. If they work we can replace the chillers and the rooftop cooling tower, lowering our costs and reducing our carbon footprint.

Ahead of the energy curve. Despite our C energy rating, we won’t have any LL97 fines until 2030. We've done everything we can reasonably do to reduce energy use. All our lights are LEDs, there are flow monitors on the valve controls for our plumbing system, and we installed double-paned windows. Supervising that work for all eight buildings was my job at the time. Solar won’t work for us, because our roof area isn’t big enough for the size of our building, but we’re always examining other carbon-cutting possibilities. 

The next chapter. I first joined the board because it was interesting and would make a big, anonymous type building more like my home. But I also consider it community service. I'll be running for re-election this year, but at some point I'll have to stop. There are a couple of board members who are also at the upper end of the geriatric scale, and we’re looking for younger people to fill future vacancies so we have a proper succession plan. But I’m in no hurry. I love doing this.

Ross’s comments have been condensed and edited for clarity.