NYC Tries a New Tactic in the Battle Against Rats

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. As many of you know, we've been interviewing and taking your calls for every member of the New York City Council this year with most of the 51 members being new. One of the questions I ask every member is, since you took office, what's the number one reason that constituents contact your office? If you've been listening to the show a lot this year, you're probably sick of hearing me ask that question by now. What's the number one reason that constituents contact your office? What are people reaching out for help with?

Well, having done 40 of these by now, the sample is large and the results are in, three issues keep coming up time and again, help with housing, help with crime and help with dirty streets and rats. Here's a sampling from that last category from four council members in our series.

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Councilmember Rita Joseph: Without a doubt, the number one issue that we hear about from neighbors is garbage.

Lincoln wrestler: They reach out about definitely trash. Trash is the number one and rats. [laughs]

Kevin Riley: Sanitation, it's the abundance of garbage that's plaguing our communities.

Councilmember Diana Ayala: I think sanitation will probably come in second. The streets are filthy, we have rats everywhere.

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Brian Lehrer: That last one was Councilmember Diana Ayala from back in February, proceeded by Kevin Riley, who was on in March Lincoln wrestler in August, and Councilmember Rita Joseph just last week. Council members from all over the city telling us that they're hearing from their constituents about trash and the rats that come with it. Well, I don't know if Mayor Adams has been listening to the show but yesterday his administration proposed some changes to the garbage collection laws in the city to end what the sanitation Commissioner called the all-you-can-eat buffet for rats, the Commissioner will join us in just a second.

Those same city council members we just heard from and all the others will be asked to approve the new plan. The piece that's getting the most publicity so far, the one you've probably heard, pushing back from four o'clock until eight o'clock PM, the time of day when you can put trash out for pickup the next morning. Let's see what the mayor is proposing and get your questions and reactions with the mayor's cleaner up in charge the New York City sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch. Commissioner, we really appreciate you coming on for this and I'm sure you're busy on the day after this came out. Welcome to WNYC.

Commissioner Jessica Tisch: Thank you so much for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, your questions for the sanitation Commissioner, and your first reactions to the new plan. Welcome here at 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer. Can we start with you just describing the situation as you see it? Why did you say all-you-can-eat buffet for rats, how bad is it and compared to other times in recent years passed in the city?

Commissioner Jessica Tisch: Right now, New Yorkers can put their trash bags out on the streets starting at 4:00 PM, that's been the case since the late 1960s. There was a sanitation strike and that's when this whole idea of putting black bags directly on the curb started. 50 plus years since nothing's changed and New Yorkers don't like two things. First, they don't like walking down the streets when they're walking home from work or dropping their kids off at school in the morning, and playing a game of hopscotch around all the black bags on our streets. Second, they don't like the rats that the trash bags attract.

What we want to do is shrink dramatically the amount of time that the black bags spend on the streets of our city. Today, the average trash bag spends over 14 hours on New York City streets that's more hours of day on the streets than off. With 24 million pounds of trash on the curb every day, that's a lot. The plan is to move the set out time back to 8:00 PM, if New Yorkers want to set it out earlier, they can put it out at 6:00 PM but we'd have to be in a sealed container.

On our end, we're going to pick it up earlier. Instead of waiting until the 6:00 AM shift, we are now picking up a quarter of New York City trash at midnight on our overnight shift. By asking New Yorkers to set it out later and us picking it up earlier, we are going to dramatically shrink the amount of time that the black bag spent on the street

Brian Lehrer: We'll get more as we go into the details that you just laid out when the bags can be put out, the role of sealed containers, the earlier overnight pickup times. Let me stay with you for a second on the situation and what's changed and what it is you're trying to address. One of the stats I saw in the reporting on this is that there has been a 70% increase in rat sightings compared with just last year. Is that your stat from the sanitation department? If so, why would that have increased so much in the last year, if the current system with putting the bags out on the street dates to the 1960s, as you just said?

Commissioner Jessica Tisch: I think all New Yorkers have noticed that during the pandemic, the city got meaningfully dirtier. What happened was, in March of 2020, the cleaning function at the sanitation department was basically completely defunded. In July of this year, the mayor and the council restored that entire budget for cleaning. I agree with New Yorkers, the streets are unacceptably dirty, the streets can be cleaner. What we're seeing with this new investment that we've made in things like extra litter baskets service and restoring full service for our mechanical blooms, the data is beginning to show a good story.

As an example, our 311 complaints for overflowing litter baskets are down over 60% since that new funding kicked in in July, those are early indications that the strategy is working. What we're attempting to do with the set out times is one strategy of many strategies that are all being used to attack the overall problem, which is that the city is dirtier than it was before the pandemic.

Brian Lehrer: Listener via Twitter asks, "Will the new trash guidelines just make it so workers have to stay later at office buildings and apartment complexes to take out the trash later? Will custodial workers end up having to work longer hours?"

Commissioner Jessica Tisch: Every building in the city is different. That's definitely one thing that was very clear during our conversations with 32BJ and Rebny and many other stakeholders that we've met with. What I would say is this proposal actually has a few nuances that are designed to accommodate different workers and different workers' schedules.

The standard rule is 8:00 PM on the curb, 6:00 PM in a container. For staff buildings of nine or more units, we're getting an extra option, which is they can opt in once a year for a set out time between 4:00 AM and 7:00 AM, and then we'll come collect that trash at 7:00 AM. This extra option was designed so that workers in these buildings can have more options based on what their schedules are.

Brian Lehrer: Some of this, as I understand it from the reporting in the last day was in negotiation with the union 32 BJ that the Building Services Union which originally oppose this idea but now has come around, can you talk about that?

Commissioner Jessica Tisch: They worked with us very closely and they pushed us really hard to be creative and find a creative solution to 50, 60-year-old problem that no mayor has been able to solve. I think the initial proposal that we had thought of was the 6:00 PM and a container, 8:00 PM on a curb and as I was mentioning, they pushed us really hard to come up with this 4:00 to 7:00 AM option. The reason that the 4:00 AM to 7:00 AM option is something that's really out of the box for us is because what we're going to have to do and we're looking forward to it, is designed special new routes for all the buildings that opt in to the 4:00 AM to 7:00 AM set out time so that we can collect those at 7:00 AM rather than on the midnight shift.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Why would a building choose that, what do you see as the behind-the-scenes decision-making, I guess this is going to be for office buildings, this is going to be for coops, this is going to be for rental buildings.

Commissioner Jessica Tisch: This is just for residential so

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Brian Lehrer: It is.

Commissioner Jessica Tisch: Types of buildings you mentioned but not office buildings we can talk about office buildings in a second. Whether they choose the 4:00 to 7:00 AM set out or the 6:00 PM in a container 8:00 PM on the curb set out, will depend on what the workers schedule is and what the building schedule is. It will be a choice of the building owner or the building management, whatever works best for the building. We know that no two buildings are staffed the same way and 32BJ definitely made that very clear. We wanted to give the maximum number of options possible.

Brian Lehrer: Whether it's better for an individual apartment building and it's workers for the workers to come in at four in the morning or for them to stay past business hours to eight o'clock at night with the additional overnight trash collection to get these bags off the street quicker and not wait till the next morning. Listener tweets, "Cue the noise complaints as the new number one complaint for city council districts with midnight trash pickup?" Poses that as a question. I imagine that you're anticipating that. We all know how that can sound outside our windows in the city when the trash trucks roll by at any hour. There's going to be more of this at two or three o'clock in the morning?

Commissioner Jessica Tisch: We've actually been running the extra midnight collection for the past several months. Interestingly, the noise complaints are not up meaningfully. It's definitely something that we're watching. It's definitely something that we're going to keep our eye on but it has not been a problem yet.

Brian Lehrer: Carol in Harlem, you're on WNYC with New York City Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch. Hi, Carol.

Carol: Good morning. Good morning, Commissioner.

Commissioner Jessica Tisch: Good morning.

Carol: I've sent several suggestions to your office. I had suggested that you get rid of mechanical brushes because they cause infection, respiratory infections because they toss up rat droppings and cat droppings and instead--

Brian Lehrer: Carol, can I ask you to clarify when you say get rid of mechanical pressure, for listeners who don't know what that refers to, what is that?

Carol: Mechanical brushes I mean.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, brushes. I'm sorry. Brushes. Oh, I see.

Carol: To clean the streets.

Brian Lehrer: To clean the streets during often outside. Got you.

Carol: Right. Instead, use water and maybe a antiseptic.

Commissioner Jessica Tisch: Thank you for the question. The mechanical brooms actually spray water. They spray water from the bottom of the vehicle. That's actually a common misperception or misconception that they just sweep up. They actually sweep and use water and then suck everything up into the cab of the vehicle.

Brian Lehrer: Carol, thank you for your call. You don't see that as a problem that would exacerbate respiratory issues?

Commissioner Jessica Tisch: I have to say the mechanical brooms are the best street cleaning tool that we have in our arsenal. Every day, they take millions of pounds of street litter off of the streets of New York City.

Brian Lehrer: Listener tweets, the rack buffet. I should say we're getting a number of questions like this both on the phone and on Twitter. I'll try to squash them into one cogent if maybe multipart question. One listener tweets, "Collecting food scraps for composting rather than mixing them in with the garbage also makes rats' lives harder." Someone else writes, "The rat buffet is due to organic waste in black trash bags. Can we finally expand the sanitation department's curbside composting programs citywide for a win, win, win?" What do you say to those folks?

Commissioner Jessica Tisch: I totally agree that getting the food waste out of the black bags is the best rat mitigation strategy any city can have. That is why I am thrilled to tell your listeners that we recently launched the largest curbside composting program in the country. We are rolling every single week to every single address in Queens. The initial data, the early data on the program is looking really good. We've collected over a million pounds of organic waste in the first two weeks so we feel really good about it. The plan and the hope is to be able to expand to other parts of the city but we really want to get it right first in Queens before we expand.

I absolutely agree that it is a fantastic rat mitigation strategy and we have to get the food waste out of the black bags and an extra benefit because it's the right thing to do for the environment, is get all of that food waste out of landfill and instead compost it, make soil out of it, use it to create renewable energy. It's just a win, win, win.

Brian Lehrer: Do outdoor dining sheds have anything to do with the rat problem? We've gotten a lot of calls about those over the course of the pandemic. We know that those are controversial. Some people think they're great and they should be made permanent in so many cases. Other people want them gone because of noise, because of rats. They say, "I haven't seen that in the reporting on your new plan. Maybe have just missed it." Is the outdoor dining shed debate relevant to the changes that you're making to fight the rats?

Commissioner Jessica Tisch: Cleanliness of the city is definitely a shared responsibility. The sanitation department has its role to play. Residents have their part to play and businesses have an important part to play. Some outdoor dining structures especially the ones that we're going after and taking down that aren't well cared for they definitely play a part in the rat issue. Businesses just need to keep their outdoor dining structures clean. We cannot leave food on the ground in New York City.

Brian Lehrer: It sounds like you're not going to war against the outdoor dining structures so who is it up to, to enforce what you just described as best practices?

Commissioner Jessica Tisch: It's a combination of the sanitation department and the Department of Transportation.

Brian Lehrer: All right. Let's take another call. Kim in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with a sanitation commissioner Jessica Tisch. Hi, Kim.

Kim: Hi. Good morning. I'm calling to find out about what could be done about the trash under the BQE. I have the pleasure of living in Fort Greene near the Navy yard and there's just constantly as everybody knows tons of trash, people dump things. We started doing in our neighborhood a community cleanup which is a bit frustrating as a taxpayer that we should be the ones responsible to have to go under there spend hours cleaning up the trash. I did it once and I was more frustrated by it because two days later it was all filled with trash again. I just felt like nobody seems to be addressing what happens under the BQE, the city's property and how can we keep it clean.

Brian Lehrer: Kim, before the commissioner responds, can I ask you, is this a relatively new problem? Have you lived there in Fort Greene for a long time and the trash under the BQE has become worse recently?

Kim: I have been here it's seven years now. My property as I mentioned I'm two doors over from the BQE. The trash blows into my front yard. It's been a continuous problem. I actually spoke to the Department of Sanitation. He was outside and I ran out. He was a lovely man named Lou. I'd like to give a shout out. That's great. He just said it's a losing battle because he said now they even added cones if that's the correct word at the ends of each section where the trucks can't drive through to pick up the trash.

He said they used to come through more frequently and it's gotten worse because they can't get their trucks through. He said he wasn't even aware they were doing it. They just came in and added these things that blockade for the trucks. Is it getting better or worse? It's about the same. If anything worse it just adds to the rat problem that everybody's mentioning and I just feel like I'm compounded by it because of the BQE and that seems unfair as a taxpayer.

Brian Lehrer: Kim, thank you.

Kim: What you've done is a million-dollar question. Thank you so much.

Brian Lehrer: Commissioner can you help Kim and her neighbors?

Commissioner Jessica Tisch: I can help Kim. Kim, there's two pieces to this. First, we have identified that there are certain parts of the city that from a cleaning perspective I would call no man's land. It's unclear, jurisdictionally, who's supposed to clean or who's in charge of keeping that part of the city clean. You see this often with jurisdictional things between the MTA, the Port Authority, the city. What we've done is gone around and identified all of the locations in this city that we have heard about that I would say fall onto this no man's land category. We are developing a plan for the Department of Sanitation to have responsibility to clean those areas.

I think that once that goes into effect which hopefully will be very soon you will see not just a meaningful one day difference in the cleanliness of that area but a long-term sustainable difference in the area The other piece of this is illegal dumping is a terrible problem in our city. It doesn't affect every community, but in the communities that it does affect, it's just awful. It's a theft of public space. People leaving their trash on the streets of our city. Oftentimes it's people driving in from out of state and for too long there hasn't been an enforcement strategy against it.

What we've started to do is put up cameras in locations that are known for illegal dumping and the results of this camera enforcement are fantastic. Our enforcement of illegal dumping in New York City is up dramatically. We post the videos of it on Twitter, we're impounding their vehicles, we're issuing $4,000 summonses and I think that that's going to make a dent on the big problem that is illegal dumping in the city, but that's part of what's Kim has seen.

Brian Lehrer: Kim, thank you for that call. A few more minutes with the New York City Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who's nice enough to come on today and take your calls and tweets. The day after she and Mayor Adams announced this new anti-rat campaign in New York City, that involves, among other things changing the time when people are allowed to put out trash from, in most cases 4:00 PM which it is now until 8:00 PM and running more garbage trucks in the overnight hours to pick them up quicker off the streets and other aspects as well. Commissioner, another tweet that came in asks, unless New York City sets up lockable garbage bins, this says it will never solve the rat problem. These can be designed to fit into the street or sidewalk, much like dining sheds and sealed containers is part of your plan. Can you talk more about that aspect?

Commissioner Jessica Tisch: We are going all in on a long-term plan to roll out containerization in New York City. Just as your listener is suggesting, it is something that has been discussed in the city of New York for at least 10 years and no one's done it and we are going to do it, but it is something that you have to do once and you have to do right. It is something that has to be studied and all the details thought through, which is what we are doing right now. I'll give you an example. Proponents of containerization point to the fact that European cities have done this for years and years and years.

In fact, that's true, but I talked, for example, to my counterpart in Barcelona and they collect the trash every single day and we collect the trash in New York City just because the scale, the size of the density to maybe three times a week in some neighborhoods. How big would those containers have to be to accommodate the huge piles of trash in some neighborhoods? Do we have to change our collection schedule? How do we have to change our fleet?

What happens in the winter? How do people access the bins during snow? How do you weatherize them? What do they look like? What are the different sizes? All of these things are things that have to be thought through and we are doing that thinking right now because I agree that containerization is an excellent rat mitigation strategy. It just has to be done right.

Brian Lehrer: How much would that be unsightly on the streets to have all these metal bins in front of buildings everywhere?

Commissioner Jessica Tisch: We are designing them now. We're going through the process of what the design conceptually should be. Obviously, the goal will be to make them as sightly as possible, but it's just one of the many details and things that we have to work through.

Brian Lehrer: All right. We'll get one more call in here for you before we run out of time. Cassius in Brooklyn. You're on WNYC. Hello, Cassius.

Cassius: Hey, thank you, Brian. I can't understand why no one's talking about poisoning, the city putting out poison for the rats. That changing bag times, I hope that helps. [chuckles] Everyone seems to be ignoring that we need to get the numbers of the rats down and isn't the city's responsibility to put out poison. It seems like the city is not doing that at all anymore, period.

Commissioner Jessica Tisch: The Health Department actually runs that initiative and they do use rat poison, but they have to do that carefully, obviously. That is one strategy that is used. The strategy of containerization and curbside organics collection and changing the set-out times. These are all different strategies that will all come together, that all have a part to play in our efforts to reduce the number of rats in New York City and frankly, reclaim our curb lines from the black bags.

Brian Lehrer: Did I see that a lot of what we've been talking about in this conversation and that you rolled out yesterday doesn't take effect until April 1st of next year?

Commissioner Jessica Tisch: We're in the rule-making process now. Yesterday we formally propose the rule. We'll do a public hearing in the middle to end of November where we'll collect public comments on the rule. We will then look at that public comment, we'll alter the rule if necessary, and then we will promulgate the final rule. We plan for the rule to go into effect whatever the final rule ends up being on April 1st because we're going to need to give about a month's time for these larger buildings if they want to opt into the 4:00 AM to 7:00 AM set out times and design the custom routes to pick up the trash from those buildings.

Brian Lehrer: Let me finish with this. For listeners who've been with us for the full half hour or so that you've been on, they heard the montage we played at the beginning of four city council members from the show during this year, all saying that trash and rats are among the biggest problems that they hear from constituents about in their districts, council members from all over the city. As I understand it, a lot of the aspects of the plan that you and the mayor are introducing need city council approval. Do you have a sense yet of all these concerned council members concerned about trash lining up for your plan, or do you expect aspects of this to be contentious?

Commissioner Jessica Tisch: Actually, Brian, this doesn't need city council approval. This is in the sanitation department's rule-making authority. We are very pleased, however, the Councilmember Shaun Abreu has sponsored a companion bill that reinforces the rules that we just put out, but the city council members that we have worked with and talked about and briefed on this plan have largely been incredibly supportive of these efforts because they understand that the rats are a big problem and they understand that the cleanliness generally of the city is a big problem. They understand that by doing this, by making our set-out time more in line with the set-out times for trash in other cities, both domestically and around the world, we can actually make a really big dent on how our city looks and feels.

Brian Lehrer: New York City Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch, thank you so much for spending so much time with us today. We look forward to doing it again.

Commissioner Jessica Tisch: Thank you for having.

 

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