Greenfield to Sanitation: Stop the Ticketing Blitz

A New York City lawmaker says that the Sanitation Department is on a ticketing blitz for dirty sidewalks and he wants it to stop.

Councilman David Greenfield is also calling on the department to start releasing information on ticketing trends more often than once a year.

The Brooklyn Democrat said in a press release Tuesday that fines accounted for two-thirds of all summonses issued by the Environmental Control Board. More than 417,000 sanitation summonses have been issued in that time — a steep increase from the previous year, when fewer than 369,000 were issued.

“The residents of my district have increasingly been waking up to find tickets taped to their door, despite their good-faith efforts to keep their sidewalks clean,” Greenfield said. “My constituents tell me that in some cases their blocks are being targeted by Sanitation enforcement agents as often as three times a week. This is just plain unfair, and it is unacceptable. The Sanitation police should be using their resources to go after bad actors like those who dump on our streets — not a homeowner who had a potato chip bag blown onto his or her property.”

Greenfield said he will soon introduce a bill to require the sanitation department to report block-by-block summons statistics on a quarterly basis. Currently, statistics are only available on a yearly basis.

This article appeared in print on page 30 of the August 31st, 2016 edition of Hamodia.