Can I Make My Super Stop Smoking in My Building?

Q: The superintendent in my Manhattan prewar co-op building smokes all day long in his basement office. Smoking is not permitted in public spaces in the building, and all of the storage lockers that are just outside his office are constantly in smoky air. Anything we put in our storage locker will reek of cigarettes. The management company seems aware of the issue, but hasn’t stopped it. Maybe he is protected by a union? What can we do?

A: Your super may be powerful. He may command a large staff. He may be the king of his office domain. But that doesn’t give him the right to smoke there; doing so is actually forbidden two ways.

First, while the super’s apartment (if he has one) is his turf, his office is considered a common space and subject to your building’s ban on smoking in public spaces.

“Even if the super works out of there, the residents are able to visit him in the office and sometimes will need to,” said A.J. Rexhepi, managing partner at Century Management Services, which manages more than 100 buildings. “It’s not the super’s personal space.”

Second, the super’s office is also considered a workplace, and New York State’s Clean Indoor Air Act prohibits smoking in any indoor workplace, said Leni Morrison Cummins, a real estate lawyer and the chair of condos and co-ops at the firm Cozen O’Connor.

“There’s probably other building employees that go into his office,” Ms. Cummins said, “and they’re entitled to a smoke-free workplace.”

The board’s first step should be to tell the super that he may not smoke in his office, and that if he doesn’t stop there will be consequences. If that doesn’t work, Mr. Rexhepi said, the board should notify the building management company.

The management company could send a cease-and-desist letter to the super, with a copy also going to the super’s union representative and the Realty Advisory Board, a legal organization that represents unionized co-ops. If he refuses to snuff his butts, he’ll likely be fired.

Questions about problematic supers are common in Ms. Cummins’s line of work. She recalled one super in a new luxury building who dealt recreational drugs to residents and took kickbacks from contractors; he was eventually fired. Another was found sleeping in the bed in an apartment he had entered to make repairs. After he proved unable or unwilling to do his job consistently, he was terminated, too.