Sanitation Ticket -- Wrong Name

Plastic is the tricky one. When I walk down my block and see all the neighbor’s trash in clear bags, I often see items that NYC doesn’t recycle. It’s unfortunate because I know these neighbors are tyring to do the right thing, i.e. recycle, but the city’s rules are very confusing. They only take #1, #2, #5 “bottle shaped” items. That means no yogurt containers, no deli containers, no clamshell holders of strawberries or grape tomoatoes. Only beverage bottles, dish soap, lotion, shampoo bottles, etc… with those numbers. Perhaps some of these items ended up in 4:38’s bags and he/she got ticketed for them.

I am surprised nobody has challenged such tickets in a larger court.

You can’t control who puts what into your the trash in front of your home. It is unreasonable to expect you to sit and watch and guard it – especially since sanitation has no rhyme or reason as to what time of day or morning they come.

I’ve had my house ticketed for improper trash when I didn’t even put any trash out – it was the neighbor’s trash, but the garbage men threw the cans in front of my house.

I’ve had my house ticketed as a multi-family dwelling when it is just one family.

I’ve had my trash ticketed when I had all the paper in recycling bags – but it was supposed to be clear bags (not clear blue bags) or something.

Total bureacracy.

Okay…

To the person with the “improper recycling: tickets:

Do you think people walking by are possibly dropping beverage containers, paper items, or garbage into open bins. Sad to say, but may be worth wasting polyethylene and put all your recycling and garbage in bags. We use blue, clear bags for the plastic, metal and glass, colorless for paper and heavy contractor bags for garbage.

We had a LONGGGGG drawn out experience when we got a ticket for the neighbouring building. It is only a little bigger than our house but has been cut up into tons of tiny apartments. There are a lot of people living there. The buidling had a bunch of cans that disappeared (stolen, whatever) and the landlord hadn’t bothered to replace them for quite some time. The garbage, esp. recycling, was simply overflowing. Plus, with all those units, there are frequent move outs and move ins with all the associated trash this seems to create.

WE got a $100 ticket! The sanitation worker signed the slip so you couldn’t read the name (of course) and walked up OUR stoop…hello, different coloured building from the one that had the mess, and taped the slip to our door. Like his brain or visual cortex simply wasn’t working…hhh…an astute 6-year-old could see that our rowhouse is a different colour and possibly infer it as a separate address…hhhh.

Came home from a vacation (when we, of course, had no trash at all outside). Pissed at both getting an unwarranted fine AND having something out in the open like a flag saying “these people aren’t home–they haven’t taken down this slip for days!”.

Oh, and the slip had “Overflowing receptacles”…uh…we had NO receptacles at all in front of the house. Nothing.

I took lots of digital photos of the mess next door (it was atrocious at that point) and our house’s lack of any receptacles, had everything notarized per the mail-in instructions and paid for a FedEx shipment so I’d have a tracking number.

It took, I think, almost TWO years to finally get a slip back stating it had been dismissed at the hearing. Hhhh…frankly, I had forgotten about it and I had one of those “What NOW?” moments when got the mailing from DEP and it looked like it would be some form of new annoyingness. I was pleasantly surprised when i opened the envelope. It cost about $25 and a waste of time to fight the fine but there was NO way I was going to pay it.

Now, there is another building near us that puts its trash out DAYS before garbage is collected. This has been going on for a year or more since a new guy started doing their building maintenance…it’s not a large place, just an absentee landlord brownstone so it relies on City garbage collection like us. It’s annoying because they seem to be offloading huge contractor bags to the curbside to alleviate the lack of garbage can space. They must have greased some palm because they keep doing it. It is consistent, every day basically…the bags sit for days but as soon as they’re removed on garbage days, by evening, new bags are out at the curbside.

The breakdown of civilization! Heavens!!!

😉

No but seriously, bags left on the sidewalk for days are more prone to rats and dogs ripping into them…plus, there used to be regularly (and it still happens occasionally) that an emotionally disabled person rips into the bags, not apparently walking away with anything, just making a huge mess.

Sanitation inspectors have these occasional zero-tolerance ticket blitzes. They nailed my neighbor for putting out his garbage ten minutes early and cited another for putting his crushed boxes inside a box rather than a plastic bag. Funny thing there is that the latter is a retired sanitation worker.

no, it will turn into a lein on your house whenever you go to sell as they can prove you lived there when the ticket was issued.