Sanitation Miscalculation
The Woodhaven Residents’ Block Association (WRBA) doesn’t choose its causes based on what would be best for the organization. We do it based on what would be best for the community.
The Department of Sanitation (DSNY) must not understand that fact.
Earlier this month, the Times Newsweekly reported on the WRBA’s vehement objections to DSNY’s unfair practice of ticketing property owners in the middle of the night for trash that had been left outside their homes and storefronts. Such enforcement is completely unreasonable because, as DSNY has acknowledged, illegal dumping by passersby in the middle of the night is a common problem.
That means the only way property owners can avoid the tickets is by spotting the trash dumped by others in the middle of the night and cleaning it up before a DSNY agent pounces. Handling it first thing in the morning would be too late to avoid the fine.
Over the past two and a half years, the WRBA has received six tickets between the hours of 1 a.m. and 4 a.m. Of course that irritated us, but that’s not what really ticked us off. What put this issue near the top of our to-do list is when we learned that innocent residents and upstanding business owners in Woodhaven were also getting hit with these absurd tickets.
For years now, we’ve been asking DSNY to change its policy. Unfortunately, the agency has not done so. Instead, it has persisted in targeting people who’ve done nothing wrong, costing them hard-earned money while those who actually broke the law go unpunished.
We recently escalated our fight against this unfairness. We wrote a letter to Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia, reiterating our call for an end to this enforcement policy. According to the letter of reply we received, DSNY responded to our complaint by dismissing our most recent ticket and by reminding its agents to “use common sense and discretion” when issuing summonses.
Though we’re pleased our ticket was dismissed, and though we’re pleased that DSNY tacitly admitted that middle-of-the-night tickets defy common sense, this response was still inadequate.
DSNY must have thought that if they let the WRBA off the hook, we would leave them alone.
They were wrong.
This isn’t about us. It’s about the other people in Woodhaven— and across Queens, and across New York City—who are also being victimized by DSNY’s unjustifiable policy. The WRBA can’t be silenced just by dismissing our tickets.
We will continue to make our case to DSNY. We’ll continue to point out that when it snows in the middle of the night, residents have until the next day to shovel their sidewalks before they are at risk of a ticket. We’ll continue to note that Bill de Blasio, when he was Public Advocate, wrote a letter endorsing the WRBA’s call for an end to the practice of midnight ticketing. We’ll continue to highlight the fact that agents should be spending their time ticketing the dumpers, not the victims of the dumping.
And if DSNY continues not to listen to us, we will pursue this change any other way we can. We will work with our City Council Member Eric Ulrich, and his colleague Antonio Reynoso, who chairs the City Council’s sanitation committee, to try to enact legislation they’ve proposed to ban this practice.
We will work with City Comptroller Scott Stringer, who came to the last WRBA Town Hall and personally offered his assistance on this matter. And we will do our best to get Mayor de Blasio to follow up on the stance he took when he was Public Advocate.
We won’t give up this fight until everyone in this city can go to sleep knowing there won’t be a Sanitation ticket waiting for them when they wake up just because somebody else decided to break the law.
Editor’s note: The next Woodhaven Residents’ Block Association meeting is on Saturday, Nov. 15, noon at the American Legion Hall, located at 89-02 91st St. Blenkinsopp is a member of Community Board 9 and director of communications for the WRBA. For additional information on the WRBA, visit www.woodhaven-nyc.org.
