LEWISTON – Tenants of a rundown Oxford Street apartment building are going to court next week to challenge their eviction.

They haven’t paid their rent since August, in protest of the squalid conditions at the building, including a lack of heat for some, broken doors and windows and cook stoves that don’t work.

They may have caused some of the damage to the 119 Oxford St. building, but that doesn’t excuse the landlord’s lack of maintenance, tenants said Tuesday.

“They’re the only ones that can fix the heat,” said Mary Paille who lives in Unit 8. “How can we break the heat? That’s not our fault, and we didn’t cause it.”

Paille and her neighbors, the four remaining tenants in the eight-unit building, kicked off a rent strike in August against their landlord, R.L.E Limited Partnership.

They want heat and they want repairs.

The landlord has responded by evicting the lot of them. They will appear in District Court in Lewiston on Dec. 6 to challenge the evictions.

Paille shares her fourth-floor apartment with Chris Bell and a pup named Scrappy. She points to a corner of the wooden cupboard in her apartment that Scrappy has chewed away.

“That’s my fault. That’s my responsibility, and I will replace it,” she said.

But she can’t do anything about the aging cook stove that stopped working months ago. Or the lack of heat.

Paille said she stopped paying rent in August after her apartment was burglarized. Thieves got away with an old PlayStation game console and $500 in cash she had for rent. Lewiston police confirmed Tuesday night that a report had been filed Aug. 7 on the burglary.

“That would have brought me square with (the landlord),” she said. But she said she’d warned the landlord about the flimsy door to her apartment and didn’t feel responsible for paying rent once her money was stolen.

“It was their fault, I guess,” she said. The landlord responded by screwing the door shut, but she keeps a chair propped against it to keep future burglars out. Why should she bother to pay them if they can’t fix the door properly, she asked.

Other tenants had their own complaints: Hector Morales and Yvonne Bowley, who share the other fourth-floor apartment, pointed to flimsy windows that pop out with the slightest wind, and no heat. They stopped paying in August, too.

Down on the third floor, Misty Oyster has no heat and no stove. And first-floor tenants Andrew Lapan and Tina Thibodeau complained about broken windows, a dangerous stove that fails regularly, rotting floors and mold in the ceilings.

“I don’t know what went on in this building before, but it’s a problem,” said Matthew Dyer of Pine Tree Legal Assistance. Dyer is helping the tenants in their fight against eviction.

“People should not be expected to live like that, even if they are poor or whatever,” he said. “You don’t put people in this sort of a situation and then kick them out when they don’t pay.”

Neil Shankman, the attorney representing the landlord, painted a different picture.

“These are folks exploiting a system designed to protect good tenants from bad landlords,” he said. He alleged that the tenants caused much of the damage in the first place and simply don’t want to pay rent.

“Periodically, you run into these buildings where there is this mob mentality,” Shankman said. “They think anything goes, that they have no obligation to pay rent, no matter what.”

Shankman said owners have done more than $15,000 in repairs over the past six months – much of it replacing plumbing, fixing roofs and repairing damage done by the tenants. The building has never fallen below city standards.

Gil Arsenault, Lewiston’s code enforcement director, said the building has always been up to code when the city has inspected it.

But just barely.

“Things get broken, they get fixed and they get broken again,” he said. It’s in slightly worse shape than similar buildings downtown and has never been fully renovated.

“But it is shelter,” he said. “It’s not a building that would ever command high rents because of its current condition. It’s just a building that, rather than going in to put in a new kitchen or heating, they’ve just maintained. The rental income has never been there to justify that kind of expenditure.”

A code enforcement officer is scheduled to inspect the building today, in preparation for the court hearing next Wednesday.