New York City’s business improvement districts are pushing back against a new policy by the Sanitation Department that will fine them for leaving trash bags on the sidewalk — a rule that BID leaders say will penalize them for their longstanding practice of cleaning commercial corridors.
Mayor Eric Adams’ administration says the rule — set to be approved after a Feb. 10 hearing and take effect Aug. 1 — will simply hold BIDs to the same standard as businesses and small residences, which have been required to bin their trash since last year under the administration’s anti-rat containerization campaign.
But BIDs — especially smaller ones in the outer boroughs — say they lack the funding to comply with the mandate and haven’t been offered enough resources or logistical help from City Hall to help them do so. Critics say the policy could also hamstring street-cleaning nonprofit organizations like ACE that employ homeless and formerly incarcerated people and similarly leave trash bags for the city to cart away.
For decades, BIDs have filled holes in the city’s pickup efforts by bagging the trash from overflowing corner litter baskets and leaving those bags in designated spots on the street for sanitation to collect. Under the new rule, leaving bags on the street would be banned — subject to fines beginning at $75 and escalating to $400 for third and subsequent violations. BIDs would need to instead store trash in rigid bins with tight-fitting lids.
Scott Hobbs, executive director of the Village Alliance in Greenwich Village, estimates that it would cost $500,000 to purchase the supplies to containerize trash on each of the 80 corners his BID serves — equivalent to one-third of its annual budget. As a result, the group is one of at least a half dozen BIDs contemplating stopping its litter-basket service if the rule takes effect.
“We would have to stop providing service for those corner baskets,” Hobbs said. “We just can’t afford to containerize it.”
‘A logical step’
BIDs get all of their funding from annual payments from landlords in their districts, which are set by law and cannot be easily changed year-to-year. Although some BIDs are well-funded and even haul their own trash to city dumps, others have annual budgets as low as $80,000 — with sanitation typically their biggest expense. The city’s 76 BIDs picked up an average of 10,875 trash bags per day in Fiscal Year 2023.
Four BID leaders told Crain’s they support the containerization concept and want to comply but need the city to help — by providing funding to pay for containers or by ensuring that BIDs can legally place the new bins on streets without interference from other agencies like the Transportation Department.
The BIDs also emphasize that, unlike the businesses and residences already under containerization mandates, BIDs handle the public’s trash rather than their own.
“The mayor has taken a bold stance and framed this as the continued war against rats,” said Jeffrey LeFrancois, executive director of the Meatpacking BID in Manhattan. “The commissioner’s execution of it leaves room for improvement, given the lack of involvement from significant city partners like BIDs who represent hundreds of thousands of businesses and hundreds of millions of dollars in investment for this city.”
For months, BIDs have been in negotiations with Sanitation leaders and City Hall officials, including Deputy Mayor for Operations Meera Joshi, who’ve met multiple times with BID leaders since last summer. Their pushback persuaded the city to delay the rule, which was initially planned to take effect as early as August 2024.
Sanitation Department spokesman Vincent Gragnani said the agency is trying to resolve BIDs’ concerns and has proposed a number of ways for them to comply, including by bringing trash to Sanitation garages or storing it in trucks.
“Since we know that containerized trash makes for cleaner streets and sidewalks, and is therefore good for our city’s businesses, getting the trash collected by BIDs off of the curbs is a logical step in this process,” Gragnani said. “Our one-on-one meetings with BIDs to discuss how we can work together to keep bags off the curb have included personalized walkthroughs of their corridors to help them find appropriate locations for storing their trash.”
The policy dispute has put BIDs at odds with Jessica Tisch, who spearheaded the containerization push as sanitation commissioner and has close ties to the business community. Tisch left the department in November to become police commissioner, but the department has forged ahead with the new rule.
“My feeling is that BIDs need to comply with the very same rules that all of their individual members, all businesses on commercial corridors, comply with and have complied with very well for the past nine months,” Tisch said at a November City Council hearing held hours before she was named police commissioner.
‘There’s a lot of resentment’
Laura Rothrock, executive director of the Long Island City Partnership, noted that the Sanitation Department’s much-discussed $1.6 million study about how to containerize the city’s trash focused on residences and commercial waste but made little mention of BIDs, which she called an “oversight.”
It would cost about $200,000 for Rothrock’s BID to buy and install containers, which would severely strain its $2 million budget. The partnership is already trying to install on-street containers at five sites but has faced months of permitting delays from the Sanitation Department and DOT — illustrating the obstacles it might face complying with the mandate.
“There’s a lot of resentment among the BIDs for how this was handled,” said Peter Madonia, chairman of the Belmont BID in the Bronx.
Some BIDs believe the rule would unfairly infringe on their authority as private organizations and are considering suing the city to block it from taking effect, another BID leader said.
Jim Martin, executive director of the street-cleaning nonprofit ACE, testified against the planned rule at a November hearing, calling it “operationally and economically infeasible.” Attempting to comply “will significantly impact our ability to deliver direct services,” Martin said.
Gragnani, the sanitation spokesman, said Tuesday that the department will continue to allow those groups to place trash in bags “as part of a coordinated cleanup.”
