WASHINGTON—Yesterday, the United States Supreme Court declined to hear a New York City man’s lawsuit challenging the city’s scheme of issuing “unreviewable” fines to enforce the city’s building code. Serafim Katergaris and his attorneys from the Institute for Justice (IJ) filed the case in August 2022, after he was issued a $1,000 fine for a code violation he did not commit and was given no means to appeal.
“Obviously today’s decision not to hear my case is disappointing. New York violated my rights by forcing me to pay for a violation that I didn’t commit and without giving me a way to appeal,” said Serafim.
Serafim’s case began in 2014, when he purchased a home in Harlem. The previous owner had removed the boiler and did not file the proper inspection paperwork. When Serafim went to sell the home in 2021, he learned about the missing paperwork for the first time. The city had a backlog of violations; though the violation for his home was for 2013, the city didn’t get around to issuing the violation until 2015. He had no way to know of this problem. Yet he was ordered to pay $1,000 for someone else’s mistake.
After Serafim learned about the previous owner’s actions, he asked the Department of Buildings (DOB) for a hearing but was denied. The DOB provides no appeal for a homeowner to challenge such a violation. He had only one choice: pay up. DOB’s policy of issuing fines with no process for appeal is not limited to boiler reports. The Department issues unreviewable fines for all sorts of suspected code violations.
“Issuing people fines and providing them no way to contest the violation completely flips our justice system on its head and deprives people of their basic due process rights,” said IJ Senior Attorney Diana Simpson. “We’ll continue fighting back against these perverse systems wherever they exist.”
In June 2024, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed Serafim’s lawsuit, concluding that the statute of limitations expired in 2018, three years after the city purported to mail the notice of violation. It presumed that notice had been appropriately mailed and that Serafim received it despite the evidence that hundreds of people never received their notices for boiler violations that year and that Serafim himself swore he hadn’t received it. Serafim and IJ then appealed that ruling to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, but, in a decision that conflicts with how most other federal courts approach the issue, the appellate court sided with the city and affirmed the district court’s misguided determination. Serafim asked the Supreme Court to bring the Second Circuit’s approach in line with that in the rest of the country. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court refused.
IJ previously challenged DOB’s unreviewable fines scheme on behalf of a man who was issued $11,000 in fines for building a pigeon coop on his rooftop.
“Both of these setbacks were based on purely procedural grounds. No court has yet to review whether this system complies with the Constitution. When one does, we are confident it will conclude that this system violates due process. We remain committed to getting New York City’s unconstitutional scheme before a court on the merits and to challenging similar abusive fines and fees systems that violate people’s due process rights wherever we see them,” said IJ President and Chief Counsel Scott Bullock. “New Yorkers deserve a more just system for enforcing code violations.”