NAPANOCH – By now the story's made the rounds in the area's newspapers and even the Associated Press — the landlord of the Yama Farms Apartments, Ireneusz Kalinowski, was arrested by the Ulster County Police last Wednesday, having been charged with failing to provide heat and hot water to several of his tenants.

But of course, depending on who you talk to about the situation, the matter is not as simple as it seems.

On Wednesday morning of last week, Baron Berg of the Town of Wawarsing Building Department made his way to the Yama Farm Apartments at 199 Route 55, responding to a complaint that there wasn't adequate heat.

"When I went there that day, I went to three apartments, and at one of them the temperature reading was 60.4 degrees, and the other two were 62.2, which is well under what code requires," said Berg, who explained that New York State requires heat be provided at a minimum of 68 degrees Fahrenheit.

"This is not the first problem we've had with him. We've had him in court before and fined him."

Berg said that during the winter of 2004-2005, Kalinowski — who has owned the property for the past six years — was fined for burning wood in an oil burning stove, which he said is illegal and created a fire hazard.

But Berg also noted that, since then, there have been no problems and very few complaints regarding heat and hot water at the apartments. This year, however, things were different, and Berg said that he's received more complaints this winter than in the last few years.

When he went to investigate, Berg described what the tenant who called him and what Kalinowski had to say about the situation.

"The tenant's argument was 'I'm not paying rent, because I'm not getting heat.' [Kalinowki's] counterargument was, 'you're not getting heat because you're not paying rent,' which is illegal, you must provide heat. If people aren't paying rent, you can take them to court and evict them, but you must supply them heat. I told him that, he didn't want to listen, so finally I gave him a summons."

"Sometime that day [he] began turning people's heat off, at which point they called the police, because now it was after hours, and we [the building department] were closed." Berg said that he thought Kalinowski turned off the heat "in retaliation of the tenants who had let me take temperature readings." Once this happened, the Ulster County Sheriff was called, and Kalinowski was arrested and charged with several counts of failing to furnish heat and hot water in violation of the Real Property Law and several counts of criminal nuisance in the second degree.

The tenant who called Berg to his home told a similar story.

"We've been going through this since September," he said. The tenants involved in the situation wished to remain anonymous because they feared their ability to relocate to new apartments should their names be made public in this story.

"He was downstairs, so he didn't know the cops were out here," said the tenant. He said that when Kalinowski realized the police were there, he had gone to turn the heat back on, at which point he was arrested.

"Last year is wasn't like this. This year, he's just being a slum landlord," he continued.

Another tenant described what Kalinowski told her: "The pipes had busted, he was trying to fix them, he says he doesn't have money to fix anything, but half the tenants he has are Section 8 or Social Services, so it's guaranteed rent."

While many of the tenants in the apartments do qualify for assistance, Section 8 and Social Services do not provide for all of the rent, and the rest of it is supposed to come from the tenants themselves — money which Kalinowski alleges has not been paid to him, and that he is owed over $17,500.

Kalinowski provided a different story, saying that he was treated unfairly by the building department and the police.

"Whatever's in the newspapers now was said without checking what happened, without consulting with us, so you have the chance to hear the truth," said Hubbrt Kalinowski, translating for his father Ireneusz whose primary language is Polish.

Kalinowski said that he never turned off the heat, and that he didn't know that the apartments weren't getting adequate heat that morning. The tenants never contacted him to let him know of the problem, and they went straight to the building department without giving him the chance to look into it. Even after getting the citation from Berg, he said that he spent the day trying to figure out why some apartments weren't getting adequate heat, even though the temperature in the wood stove which heats the apartments was high. Eventually, he said he discovered that there was a problem with one of the pipes' insulation. Before he had discovered this, however, the police came to arrest him. After he'd been released, he and his son worked through the night to fix the problem, and he said that the heat returned at about 6 a.m. the next morning.

Kalinowski also noted that there's an inequity in how the police and the courts treat him and the tenants — when his wife went to court to file charges for non-payment, the tenants were given appearance tickets for March, even though they hadn't been paying for two months prior, totaling five months he'll go without being paid. In contrast, when he was charged, his appearance ticket is for two weeks from the incident.

"I felt hurt," said Kalinowski through his son. "I couldn't believe I was in a country that's a democracy."

For now, Kalinowski said that he will describe the details of what happened in court. His appearance ticket for the sheriff's charges has him in Wawarsing Town Court on January 30 at 8:30 a.m., and his ticket for the building department's charges is for February 6 at 8:30 a.m.

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