Woodhaven civic leaders and elected officials are urging the city Department of Sanitation to change its policy on trash removal after property and business owners said they have been unfairly slapped with tickets that are more about lining the city’s coffers than protecting residents.
Woodhaven Residents’ Block Association President Ed Wendell shows tickets the WRBA was given by the city for violations Wendell said it did not commit. Wendell and other civic leaders are urging the city to rethink its trash collection, and ticketing, policy, which they said burdens property and business owners instead of targeting garbage dumpers.
Owners have faced forking over as much as $350 per ticket – once fines have accrued while an individual fights the ticket in court – for garbage problems that are not their fault, but rather stem from people who dump everything from mattresses to pieces of paper on others’ property, according to Woodhaven Residents’ Block Association President Ed Wendell and Woodhaven Business Improvement District Executive Director Maria Thomson. The two civic leaders said individuals – many of whom are likely living in illegally converted apartments where the landlords will not allow them to properly discard garbage in an effort to not draw attention to the sites – will often dump late at night or in the day’s earliest hours. Not long after people have shed their garbage, Wendell and Thomson said the city will ticket owners for such violations as improperly disposed garbage or not recycling – and then remove the garbage before the owners know any of this has transpired.
“Tickets are getting written at one, two, three in the morning,” Wendell said. “They come and write the ticket, the garbage gets taken away and when you fight the ticket and say the garbage isn’t yours, the judge says that in the absence of evidence the burden of proof is on you. But they took away the evidence.”
For example, Wendell said the WRBA was given a $25 ticket for not recycling, and he said the non-recyclables were pieces of paper that somebody else has thrown into their bin.
“We get this ticket, which was written at 2:30 in the morning – so by the time we see the ticket, the garbage was gone,” Wendell said. “They write you a ticket at 2:30 in the morning and take away the evidence. Others have gotten $100 tickets for a mattress or bureau somebody threw out. This has happened to many people.
“This is not about keeping the streets clean,” Wendell continued. “This has everything to do with putting more money in their pockets.”
A DSNY spokeswoman said, in response to Wendell’s complaint, that “the recycling was placed out for collection apparently by tenants of the building” and that the “officers issued the summonses as dictated by law and were unaware that the building was owned by the block association.”
Public Advocate Bill de Blasio wrote a letter on April 10 to Department of Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty and asked that DSNY alter its trash removal policy so owners have a chance to react to garbage being dumped on their land. De Blasio said that, similar to the department’s policy on snow removal, residents should be given a grace period during the night and be exempt from receiving tickets until later in the morning.
“While I understand that it is necessary to hold property owners responsible for the garbage in front of their buildings, it is unreasonable to expect that property owners can act to ensure that all garbage in front of their home is disposed of property in the middle of the night,” de Blasio wrote in his letter. “While the practice of finding a property owner for something disposed of improperly at 2:45 in the morning will generate additional revenue for the city through the fines collected because of these violations, it will not change the behavior of the owner.”
A Department of Sanitation spokeswoman said the department plans to respond to de Blasio’s letter. She also recommended that should residents see people illegally dumping, they should take down the make and model of the vehicle involve in the dump, as well as the date, time, place of the dump and, if possible, the license plate number. The spokeswoman noted the department has two programs through which the public can collect monetary awards for reporting illegal dumping, the first of which being the Illegal Dumping Award Program, for which a resident must be willing to sign an affidavit and appear at an Environmental Control Board hearing. As part of the Illegal Dumping Tip Program, a person who provides information leading the DSNY to catch a dumper in the act would be eligible for a reward of up to 50 percent of any fine collected.
Thomson said a change in the policy would bring waves of relief for business owners already struggling under the weight of a still floundering economy – though she added that, in addition to de Blasio’s proposal, the city should not continue to raise the price of a fine while an individual fights a ticket in court.
“While they’re adjudicating it, they are also raising the penalty on the ticket and that is so unfair,” Thomson said. “Once you start fighting it, they should freeze it at the $100 mark. By the time they make the decision, you have to pay $350.
“The people on Woodhaven Avenue don’t even bother to fight it,” she continued. “They just send in the check, and it’s so unfortunate and really hard on us because the economic times are bad.”
The DSNY spokeswoman noted the Environmental Control Board is the adjudicating body that determines if the summons can be dismissed or if it has to be paid.
By Anna Gustafson
