Awesome: The Post reveals that Donald Trump Jr. was fired from the condo board of his own Upper West Side building! While one might initially suspects that a Trump would have a lifetime seat on a condo board of a building with the Trump name, 220 Riverside Boulevard at Trump Place was never owned by The Donald - he lent his name out to a group of investors. It seems that at a November 8 boarding meeting, resident Eugenia Kaye engineered an ouster to replace the whole board. Some tenants explained the Post why Kaye was so upset:
In late October, Kaye hand-addressed letters to the owners of all 420 units, outlining a series of grievances.
She also urged them to attend the building's Nov. 8 annual meeting to vote the board out while voting her in. Those who could not attend were asked to vote via proxy.
Among the gripes was the board's requirement that tenants schlep across town to Trump headquarters to read the minutes from its monthly meetings, rather than having them e-mailed or available in the building, another tenant said.
"Even if we did go over there, they wouldn't give us copies of the minutes. We had to read them in the office," the tenant said.
There were also questions about an $80,000 line item in the management's ledger categorized as "other" under "office expenses."
The most irksome issue seemed to be the board's handling of a recent $300,000 Con Ed bill, which it initially said were charges assessed on a faulty electric meter.
"A month later, they sent a second letter telling us it was for a broken gas meter," said another tenant. "We never got the full story."
Ha! The ol' "it's a broken electric meter...no, it's a broken gas meter" scam - we just thought that happened in less posh buildings. Now, many building condo board meetings are never widely attended, and at the meeting where only 60 of 400 some owners attended, the board president ruled there was no quorum. A tenant tells the Post that's when Kaye took out 150 proxy votes and managed to replace the whole board, with herself elected as president.
Trump Jr. said that Kaye's actions were "possibly fraudulent" and "very underhanded." Whatever, if this were pulled off by any Apprentice contestant, we're sure they'd get props. And fun fact: Kaye is the wife of Tony Kaye, who famously tried to take his directing credit off the film American History X.
