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The Brooklyn Paper / Kate Emerson

Dirty job: Our photographer didn’t need much time to find plenty of examples of filth on the streets of increasingly soiled Bay Ridge.

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Bay Ridge is trashy.

Residents say the neighborhood by the Narrows has turned into a garbage dump and locals can’t take the dirty streets anymore.

“It’s a disaster — the avenues are filthy and they have to be cleaned up,” said state Sen. Marty Golden (R-Bay Ridge), who told residents at a town hall meeting last Monday that he was shocked by the soiled state of Fifth Avenue.

“It was the filthiest street I’ve ever seen in my whole life,” said Golden, who called for additional afternoon trash pick-ups to alleviate the garbage problem.

Councilman Vince Gentile (D-Bay Ridge) — who last year funded an additional truck to empty waste baskets on Third and Fifth avenues — pointed his finger at the mayor’s across-the-board budget slashes for the neighborhood’s increasingly filthy streets.

But other Ridgites are blaming residents themselves for sullying the neighborhood, which only last year was declared “acceptably clean” by the mayor’s office — cleaner, in fact, than the citywide average.

The growing refuse menace is “a real problem,” said Community Board 10 District Manager Josephine Beckmann, who partly blamed the increase in litter on Third and Fifth avenues on Bay Ridge residents who clog corner wastebaskets by filling them with household trash — which is illegal.

“Every week we get calls about garbage flowing out of the pails and onto the street,” said Beckmann, who called for greater enforcement.

In a seeming irony, Community Board 10 voted earlier this year to remove some corner wastebaskets, saying that the move would actually help keep the area tidy.

Department of Sanitation spokesman Matthew LiPani also said the agency had met the enemy — and it is you.

“The baskets along both of these strips are frequently being illegally used for disposal of household and commercial waste,” said LiPani, whose agency empties litter baskets on Third and Fifth avenues four times per week. “We are aware of the situation and have issued scores of summonses.”

But the threat of $100 summonses hasn’t stopped the menace of residential dumping.

And until it does, keeping Bay Ridge beautiful might become the responsibility of neighborhood residents, Beckmann said.

“People might have to step up a little bit and help keep the neighborhood clean — even if that means we have to sweep up and pick it up ourselves,” she said.

©2009 Community Newspaper Group

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