Rent Board Postpones Ruling On Plympton St. Complaint

The Cambridge Rent Control Board decided last week to postpone indefinitely a final ruling on a request by tenants at a Harvard-owned building at 8 Plympton St. for a refund of a year of rent overcharges.

The overcharges stem from a rent board miscalculation of a 1981 general rent adjustment, and representatives of Harvard Real Estate, which manages the apartment building, have contended that the University should not be liable for a rebate amounting to about $11,000.

Two rent board members said last night that before issuing a ruling on the 8 Plympton case, the board hopes to set a general policy for buildings that contain both commercial and residential buildings. The 8 Plympton structure houses businesses in addition to about four dozen apartments.

Tenant Anne Brinton who brought the miscalculation to the board's attention several weeks ago, said yesterday that, in the event of an adverse decision by the board, she would take the case to civil court.

Reopening

The rent board, after originally deciding to apply the rent correction only to future charges, moved 10 days ago to reopen the case because of a precedent involving retroactive rent corrections. Board member Alfred Cohn said that in at least one case where tenants had been charged too little because of a miscalculation, they had been ordered to pay the full difference retroactively.

But HRE attorney Daniel Polvere told the board in a memorandum that a decision in favor of a retroactive correction by Harvard would open "a Pandora's box out of which would fly many other petitions to reopen cases."