The Sanitation Dept.’s Unfair Enforcement
The Woodhaven Residents’ Block Association (WRBA) has an office at 84-20 Jamaica Ave. As the owners of a storefront on a commercial strip, the WRBA has experienced firsthand some of the problems faced by businesses on the avenue.
One of the most annoying we’ve encountered recently is the Department of Sanitation’s unfair habit of issuing fines to Jamaica Avenue properties in the middle of the night.
Small businesses are getting hammered by Sanitation for trash left outside their storefronts. This trash-especially large junk-is often dumped illegally by neighbors or passers-by, not by the businesses. And it frequently happens at night. I myself have witnessed this sort of activity in the wee hours of the morning.
Make no mistake: We are in favor of businesses taking responsibility for maintaining their properties, even if it means cleaning up trash that others left behind. But we believe those businesses should at least have the chance to dispose of the trash appropriately before receiving a fine. When summonses are issued in the dead of night, business owners don’t even have the chance to see the rubbish on their property before being ticketed.
The WRBA has received summonses from Sanitation recently for trash that was dumped outside our office. One ticket was issued at 2:45 a.m., another at 1:47 a.m. In neither case could we have cleaned up the mess without visiting the premises every night, long after most people’s bedtimes. It’s an unreasonable burden and it’s unfair to hold us and small businesses to this standard.
We’re not the only ones who think so. Public Advocate Bill de Blasio wrote a letter to the Sanitation commissioner defending the WRBA and pointing out that middle-of-the-night fines do not create positive incentives. He also noted that when it snows, property owners are not immediately required to shovel snow that stopped after 9 p.m. the previous night. De Blasio asked for a similar rule to apply to garbage disposal.
City Council Member Eric Ulrich, who represents part of Woodhaven, also responded to the WRBA’s complaints. He is working on legislation that will require all Sanitation tickets written in the evening to be issued at a more reasonable hour. We certainly hope this becomes the law soon.
Both Ulrich and City Council Member Elizabeth Crowley, who represents the rest of Woodhaven, also voted in favor of a separate piece of legislation that the mayor signed into law last week. That law requires Sanitation and other city agencies regulating small businesses to look at their rules and determine when fines could be replaced by warnings. This law should prompt Sanitation to reconsider their current practice of midnight fines.
We thank and respect the hardworking Sanitation employees who collect our trash and clean our streets. Our gripes are not about them. But whoever ordered Sanitation enforcement agents to ticket small businesses in the middle of the night is playing dirty. And the judges at the city’s Environmental Control Board who uphold these tickets are ignoring common sense.
The WRBA has proposed a simple, logical way for Sanitation to combat improper disposal of garbage and other infractions. As I wrote in this newspaper nearly a year ago, Sanitation should use photographic evidence and sworn testimony from citizens when prosecuting lawbreakers. Instead, the agency will consider evidence only if it’s provided by their own enforcement agents-yes, the same people issuing unfair tickets to the WRBA.
We hope that Sanitation ends its bad policies and adopts productive new ones. And if it doesn’t, we hope our elected representatives will force them to do so.
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Editor’s note: Blenkinsopp is member of Community Board 9 and director of communications for the Woodhaven Residents’ Block Association. For additional information on the WRBA, visit www.woodhavennyc.org.
