Residents of 73rd Street between Fourth and Fifth avenues returned home from work on Monday to discover litter summonses greeting them at the door — the latest example, some say, of an ongoing ticket blitz in Bay Ridge.
“At least seven people on the block received $25 tickets,” said resident Janice Schiavo. “I am not going to pay this ticket because that would be an admission of guilt, and I am not guilty.”
The trouble began when Schiavo was leaving to work on Monday morning and noticed a Sanitation officer going through her neighbor’s trash.
“I didn’t really didn’t think much of it,’ said Schiavo. “I was late.”
Too bad she didn’t stick around a little longer, because later in the day, she returned to discover that the agent had slapped her house with a summons.
The violation on the ticket claims that she “used an improper container to store her recyclables,” which irked Schiavo, because she didn’t use a container, instead placing her recyclables out in a clear plastic bag.
“I started to talk with other people on my block, and everyone I spoke with received the same ticket and we didn’t use containers,” said Schiavo, who described herself as a “radical environmentalist from the ’60s” and, as such, vowed to fight the ticket.
The 73rd Street snafu comes after green warrior Theresa Maresco received two $100 citations for pieces of paper that were blown into her yard when she was not there, and another story about a woman who received a ticket for a dirty driveway — even though she doesn’t have a driveway!
One local official discovered a little-known tool that Schiavo and others can use in their defense against the Sanitation Department.
“If you call the number on the back of the ticket to request a hearing, you can also request the presence of the officer who wrote the ticket,” said Eric Kuo, a spokesman for Councilman Vince Gentile (D–Bay Ridge).
“If you get a ticket and you feel it was unfair, schedule the hearing, request the officer to appear, tell your side of the story, and there is a good chance that they will throw out the ticket,” Kuo said.
There is also a good chance that the inspector, busy with other things, won’t show, others said.
A Sanitation spokesman would not discuss the specific violation against Schiavo, but insisted that “ticket blitzes” are a myth.
“I know the agency doesn’t ‘ticket blitz,’” agency spokesman Matthew LiPani said. “It is unlikely that the entire block got a ticket.”
LiPani also said that Schiavo’s specific violation could have been for a number of reasons.
“It could be that there was household waste that she wasn’t aware of,” he said.
