When temperatures drop to perilous lows, a landlord-tenant relationship must shift from commerce to safety. There’s no excuse for landlords to fail to heat, or monitor the heat, of their buildings. It is more than maintenance; it is life and death.

During the past few weeks, we’ve chronicled the challenges faced by residents of 153-155 Bartlett St. in Lewiston – a family of Sudanese immigrants – as they’ve shivered during the arctic snap. Their oil tank ran dry and their heat malfunctioned, leaving them helpless.

In some cases, it was the landlord’s fault for not filling the tank. Another time, a broken pipe caused the outage. Either way, the landlord is culpable. Yet enforcement rules of the city of Lewiston seem to allow broad leeway in such a potentially dangerous situation.

The landlord, Travis Soule, was fined $110 once for failing to heat the building; this seems small, given the 11 complaints he’s accrued this winter.

Eventually, to force behavioral change, repeat offenders should face penalties that increase from disincentive to punitive.

This principal is in our criminal justice system, from “three strikes and you’re out” on federal felony convictions to Maine’s punishment hierarchy for drunken driving, which grows into longer license suspensions and prison terms if things don’t change.

It strikes us that small fines could be absorbed as a “cost of doing business” for landlords, rather than be a signal for them to change. The levy should be high enough to be effective, but not too high as to be ignored (nobody is going to pay a $2,000 fine, for example).

New York, as one comparison, has a “no-heat” fine for landlords that starts at $250-$500 for the first offense, then increases to a maximum of $1,000 per day for subsequent violations. The pay scale of New York’s fines isn’t right for Maine, but the thinking appears dead-on.

In winter, tenants need heat, regardless of who they are, where they’re from, where they live or how they pay. Landlords must provide it. It is non-negotiable.

Yet the mechanisms for landlord-tenant disputes – mediation, courts, etc. – move too slowly when it is zero degrees outside and the heat quits. It’s here that the municipal government must force the hands of landlords who do not respond quickly to restore heat.

To do so, punishments should be tougher, especially for repeat offenders.