The co-op advocacy group against Local Law 97 ran on $750,000 from REBNY. New York has no disclosure requirement for it.

In September 2026, hundreds of co-op and condo owners rallied in Lower Manhattan against Local Law 97 fines, organized by Co-ops and Condos United of NY. The group's February 2026 formation announcement described it as a new grassroots advocacy organization. What the announcement did not say: the organization is a rebranding of a group that received more than $750,000 in funding from a lobbying arm of the Real Estate Board of New York. Geoffrey Mazel, CCU's co-founder, confirmed the connection on the record to reporters. New York has no statute requiring co-op owners to know about it before they join a rally or rely on the group's legislative positions.

What the group is asking for.

Co-ops and Condos United is asking the New York City Council to delay Local Law 97 enforcement by seven years. The vehicle is a bill sponsored by Councilmember Vickie Paladino that would push back the fine schedule's implementation timeline, with the steeper 2030 caps following accordingly. A separate proposal, Intro 1197, introduced by Council Members Linda Lee and Sandra Ung, would suspend LL97 penalties until 2036 for buildings whose average per-unit assessed value falls below $65,000.

Both proposals arise from a real financial pressure. Under NYC Administrative Code §28-320.6.1, the penalty for emissions above a building's annual cap is $268 per metric ton of CO2-equivalent. For a co-op building that exceeds its 2024 cap by 500 metric tons, the annual fine is $134,000. Under the tighter 2030 threshold, the same building over by 1,500 metric tons owes $402,000. Those numbers produce genuine political will for delay. They also produce the contractor and consulting revenues that compliance with those numbers generates for the firms managing the response.

CCU has also lobbied at the state level for delays to New York's Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act targets. In both cases, the stated purpose is protecting co-op shareholders from costs they did not cause and cannot easily absorb. That argument deserves a hearing. The question this post addresses is a different one: who paid to build the organization making it.

The $750,000 that built the organization.

Until late 2025, the organization now called Co-ops and Condos United of NY operated as Homeowners for a Stronger New York. City Limits and NYS Focus reported on September 24, 2026, that Homeowners for a Stronger New York received all of its funding from a lobbying group run by REBNY, totaling more than $750,000.

REBNY is the Real Estate Board of New York, the trade association for the city's largest real estate developers, managing firms, and brokers. It is not a co-op owner organization. It represents the companies that build, manage, sell, and profit from the buildings that co-op shareholders live in.

Geoffrey Mazel, CCU's co-founder and legal advisor, confirmed the REBNY funding on the record. He told reporters the organization "receives funding from REBNY" while maintaining it also has "a lot of support in the co-op community." The co-op community support and the REBNY funding are not mutually exclusive. The disclosure gap is that New York has no mechanism requiring one to appear alongside the other in any document a co-op owner would see before joining the rally or acting on the group's legislative recommendations.

Who is leading the campaign.

CCU's founding leadership, identified in its own press materials and public statements, includes Stuart Saft, Real Estate Practice Group Leader at Holland & Knight; Geoffrey Mazel, managing agent and real estate attorney; Jane Menton; and Michael Wolfe, identified with property management. All four have spoken publicly on behalf of CCU in the context of LL97 advocacy.

Law firms advising condo and co-op boards routinely counsel on LL97 compliance obligations, energy audit contracts, and retrofit vendor selection. Managing agents coordinate the LL97 compliance spending that boards undertake. These relationships are not improper. They describe the ordinary business of representing the New York co-op and condo sector. What they are not is disclosed to co-op shareholders when CCU asks those shareholders to support legislation that would modify the mandate driving that same compliance spending.

Compare the analogy: a public company's proxy rules require directors to disclose material financial interests before voting on transactions that might benefit them personally. The SEC requires this because undisclosed interests, however unintentional, erode the trust that makes representative governance work. Co-op shareholders in New York have no equivalent protection when an advocacy group led by their building's managing attorneys and agents asks them to back legislation that would also extend those agents' compliance-service timelines.

The financial logic of a seven-year delay.

For co-op shareholders who are already over their 2024 emissions cap, a seven-year delay means seven years of fine relief. The $268-per-ton penalty, which accumulates annually, would not apply during the delay period. For buildings with modest reserves and limited retrofit capacity, that is real financial breathing room.

For managing agents and LL97 compliance firms, the same delay extends the window during which retrofit planning, engineering assessments, and compliance contracts are being placed. It does not eliminate LL97 compliance spending. It spreads that spending over a longer and more uncertain runway, with more cycles of reassessment, rebidding, and contract revision. The managing agent directing that spending faces no fiduciary standard on vendor selection under New York law. S.71, the managing-agent registration bill, had no identified Senate sponsor going into the 2027 session. The bill never received a committee hearing in nine consecutive sessions.

Whether a seven-year delay is the right policy choice for co-op owners involves competing legitimate considerations: financial hardship on affordable buildings, environmental targets, and the actual pace at which retrofit technology is available at reasonable cost. CCNYC takes no position on the merits of that tradeoff. The structural question this site does address is the one LL97 illustrates as clearly as any mandate in the extraction stack: the same vendor ecosystem that profits from a mandate's compliance requirements is also positioned to profit from a delay that extends the compliance cycle, and New York requires no disclosure of that positioning when the vendor leads the advocacy.

What New York requires of advocacy groups.

New York's lobbying disclosure law covers registered lobbyists: individuals and entities paid to communicate directly with elected officials on specific legislation. It does not cover advocacy organizations that build political pressure through rallies, member communications, and media coverage. This is not unusual; most states draw the same line. The gap is not New York-specific.

What is specific to New York is the combination. Managing agents are unlicensed and owe no fiduciary standard to unit owners on compliance spending decisions. The bills that would have changed that, S.71 and S8912, did not advance in the 2025-2026 session. In the absence of those standards, the same managing agents are also free to lead and fund the advocacy organizations that co-op shareholders turn to for guidance on the legislative remedies for that same spending. The loop closes through gaps, not through malfeasance.

There is no pending bill in the New York City Council or the state legislature requiring advocacy organizations that take positions on building mandates to disclose the financial relationships between their leadership and the mandate's compliance ecosystem. The managing-agent licensure gap and the competitive-bidding gap are documented at length in our issues pages. The advocacy-funding disclosure gap that this story illustrates is a structural extension of both.

Bottom line.

Co-ops and Condos United has built something real: organized political representation for co-op and condo owners who have historically had no unified voice. The costs documented in the CNYC survey, $5,859 in per-household annual increases since 2019, are real, and organizing around them is a legitimate response to a genuine financial burden.

The structural question is not whether co-op owners should organize. It is whether the organizations they join are required to tell them who built the organization and who continues to fund it. Geoffrey Mazel told that to reporters. New York does not require it to appear in CCU's member communications, its rally materials, or its legislative testimony.

New York's extraction framework operates through gaps. The managing-agent licensing gap, the reserve study gap, the AG jurisdiction gap: each one allows an entity with a financial interest in a specific outcome to act in that space without the disclosure that would let owners evaluate the interest. The advocacy-funding disclosure gap is the same mechanism operating at the organizational level. As long as it persists, co-op owners will join campaigns organized on their behalf by the same industry whose accountability they are trying to address.

Primary sources: City Limits, Sept. 24, 2026 · NYS Focus, Sept. 24, 2026 · NYC Administrative Code §28-320.6.1 (LL97 per-building penalty schedule) · Geoffrey Mazel, on-record statement confirming REBNY funding (reported by City Limits)

Companion resources: The NYC local-law extraction stack · LL97 first-year compliance and the 2030 cliff · S.71 has no Senate sponsor for 2027 · CNYC's LL97 scorecard and the accountability gap · Issue: Managing-agent licensure gap · Issue: No competitive-bidding requirement · Write to your representative