Day Care Center Says $100 Sanitation Ticket is Garbage!

Bed-Stuy resident Beatrice Jones was startled and confused yesterday, when a sanitation enforcement agent walked through her front door and handed her a $100 ticket for failure to display a refuse and recycling decal in her window.

The display of such stickers or decals, which outline days of service for pickup, are a requirement by the New York City Department of Sanitation for all commercial property, and the failure to display prominently in the window is a violation worth $100.

The only problem is, , located at 992 Gates Avenue, where Jones is the executive director, is a non-profit organization, and in the 22 years of its operation, she had never received one ticket.

“When we moved here in 1990, I called sanitation in Manhattan to ask how I should arrange for my garbage to be picked up, and they told me to send in whatever required paperwork, and I did. And they began picking up my bags,” said Jones. “But I don’t have a decal, because they never issued me one.”

The sanitation agent told Jones, even as a non-profit, the business was in fact in violation and that he had issued other tickets to similar businesses in the neighborhood, including to the Bushwick Stuyvesant Heights Home Attendant Agency– another non-profit directly up the block from Good Samaritan.

So Jones reached out to the Department of Sanitation, and Kathy Dawkins, head of the DSNYC office of Public Information, assured her the ticket was issued erroneously, that she ran into an “overzealous agent,” and that she was not required to display a sticker if she had already made the proper arrangements.

In a statement to Bed-Stuy Patch, Dawkins wrote: “Once a summons is written, the Department of Sanitation can not revoke it; that has to be done at the Environmental Control Board. It was further explained to [Jones] that she could contest the summons at the Environmental Control Board [with the proper documentation].” 

“My thing is, if this guy is issuing these tickets like this, I want other businesses in the neighborhood to know that it’s wrong and they don’t have to pay,” said Jones. She even went so far as to say she felt the agent was targeting the neighborhood, because he didn’t believe anyone would bother to investigate.

“I think they are enforcing on this community, because they think they can get away with it,” she said. “I do, I do! But he messed with the wrong person. Or as my toddlers here sometimes say, they didn’t know ‘who I are.’”