Pass a saliva drug test
Nashua attorney Elliot Berry, a 33-year veteran of tenant law and considered one of the “go-to” guys in the state adhering tenant law matters, said he wasn’t aware of anything in the law that would interrupt a landlord from drug testing his tenants, but agreed with those who said it was demeaning.
“Sounds approve prison to me,” Berry said.
“This is portion of the untold story,” he said, explaining that crowd of the city’s poorest tenants will agree to everything kinds of questionable lease requirements in prescription to obtain or keep housing.
“The power dynamics are still thus in favor of the landlord, especially when it involves tenants with limited incomes,” Berry said, explaining that tenants who are struggling are not often able to treat for the provisions of a let.
“It’s a delight it or leave it,” he said.
Questionable ’services’
Under the heading of “Naturopathic Counselor,” the Freedom Apartments Web location states:
“Try all natural and herbal approaches to treating conditions and replacing or supplementing medications.”
The listing is just one of the “support services” offered to Freedom Apartment tenants. Also included under the heading is “religious guidance” and “predicament management.”
According to several of Eckler’s current and former tenants, however, the services aren’t so much offered as they’re pushed. At least two current tenants and two former tenants said Eckler had pressured them to make an close of taking prescribed medications and had given them vitamins.
Bobbie Lavoie has lived at 22 Amory St. for nearly a decade. She said Eckler “wouldn’familiarily dare ask,” to medicine test her, but has meddled in family business by trying to persuade her teenage son, who has a serious heart condition, including a pacemaker, to go off his medicine and take vitamins instead.
“I had to go to the cardiologist and say, ‘Look,’ ” Lavoie said, describing the horse-pill-size vitamins she took from her son to splendor his doctors.
“He was 14 when this all started happening,” Lavoie said, adding that her son, now 17, had begun fighting with her about seizing his prescribed medications.
“If Chris says something, he just takes it all in,” she said, adding that the family disturbance became in this way extreme that her son was hospitalized. She said her son’s doctors told her stop Eckler from giving her son the pills, and she did.
“He before-mentioned he wasn’t doing anything wrong, they were only vitamins,” she said. “I declared, ‘I don’confidentially care if they are vitamins or a frickin’ pill off the shelf in the store . . . he is not supposed to wish certain stuff.’ “
While the drug testing and alleged vitamin pushing were common complaints, tenants also complained that Eckler went too far by some of his behaviors, such as questioning their guests, telling their guests to leave.
One article on Eckler’session lease states that tenants aren’confidentially to allow any building inspectors on the premises without his knowledge, something about what one. many tenants said he’s serious.
“He doesn’t want anybody in the basements,” Marvell said.
Another constructer tenant, Brian Page, said Eckler told him “over and over and over,” in no degree to let city inspectors in the building without contacting him.
Lavoie said Eckler argued by her relating to putting in a Comcast telephone at her apartment that she needed conducive to her son’s pacemaker system.
“He didn’t want the cable man in the basement,” she said.
Eckler’s lease item doesn’t hold up under the law, though, since city inspectors need only a tenant’s permission to enter premises.
“A landlord does not need to be present for any inspection, nor can he prevent each inspection to occur,” said the city’s Code Enforcement Division supervisor, Nelson Ortega.
“When a tenant calls us, we are guest of the tenant, not the landlord, and if a landlord is quick in emergencies, it is since the tenant has allowed them (to be) or because we requested it. We do not need the inn-keeper’session permission to inspect a property. It is our authority under the Nashua Housing Code.”
Eckler’s disgruntled current and former tenants said that while they learned to live with “King Eckler’s” rules, they also learned to expect the rules to change frequently
In fact, one article in Eckler’s lease states that let provisions can change by a 30-day notice.
“Chris makes the rules up as he goes,” before-mentioned Page, 43, a former tenant of 6 Union St. Page said he moved to Milford be unconsumed year at the time that Eckler on a sudden stopped paying utilities, since was part of his lease.
“I got a letter from PSNH that declared, ‘Welcome to the Neighborhood,’ ” Page said.
“Chris had signed us up,” he said, adding that he called the company and turned off the service before putting in his notice to move out.
Recently, Eckler sent notices to his tenants informing them that they couldn’t have some dogs on the premises that were amid 30 select breeds. The Aug. 6 notice stated it was a requirement of his insurance company, Middlesex Mutual Assurance Co., and that non-enforcement in the past didn’t matter. Anyone who still had such dogs on the premises by the end of the month faced eviction, the notice aforesaid.
Lavoie has a 12-year-old pit bull, as well as two other pit bulls she said she has raised while living since Eckler’s tenant.
“All of a sudden, I have get rid of my dogs? After all this time?” Lavoie said.
She said the stress of living in the compound these days has increased as she and other tenants are contemplating giving up their dogs or, like her, fighting back.
“I don’t care what happens,” Lavoie said. “Chris is not getting away with what he is doing.”
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