TESTIMONY
Jessica Tisch, Commissioner of the New York City Department of Sanitation on Initiatives to Revolutionize Waste Management in NYC
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19 min
Jessica Tisch, the Commissioner of the New York City Department of Sanitation, outlines the department's comprehensive initiatives to overhaul waste management in the city.
- Tisch details plans for widespread containerization, requiring businesses and residences to use secure bins for waste instead of bags on streets
- She highlights the expansion of the curbside composting program to reach every residence citywide by fall 2023, with simple weekly collection
- Tisch discusses implementation of the commercial waste zones program to reform private carting with new safety and environmental standards
- The department is increasing enforcement against illegal dumping, abandoned vehicles, and commercial corridor littering through new strategies
Jessica Tisch
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Good morning, chair Brennan, chair of Breo, and members of the committee on sanitation and solid waste management and finance.
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I am Jessica Tisch, commissioner of the New York City Department of Sanitation, and I'm joined today by our by our first deputy commissioner Javier Lohan Joseph Antonelli, our deputy commissioner of management and budget and Ryan Marola, our deputy commissioner of External Affairs.
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It is a terrible time to be a piece of trash in New York City.
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The 10,000 public servants at the Department of Sanitation are deep into multiple rounds of offensives in the trash revolution enacting a broad variety of changes to the management collection sorting and processing of £44,000,000 of waste produced across the city every single day.
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Each of the strategic initiatives on which I will update you today could have been error defining on its own, and yet we are not allowing one major project to distract from any other.
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Just as we collect the trash in every part of the city, we are changing the way that trash is managed in every part of the city.
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This complete overhaul of our essential service is working with historic decreases in rat sightings reported concurrently with this effort.
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While the trash revolution has many components, I will provide updates on 4 key fronts.
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First is containerization.
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We are moving forward with a once in a generation change to the way the trash is set out, making tremendous strides in the long discussed but long delayed process of getting every single piece of trash off our streets and sidewalks and into secure bins and containers.
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Starting March 1, 2024, container requirements went into effect for all businesses of every type in New York City to get their trash off the streets and into a secure bin.
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There is now a new 311 service request, whereby residents can report a business not using bins.
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Between resident complaints and observations of our DSNY enforcement staff, we have written over 25100 summonses to businesses for failing to containerize their trash since the warning period ended on April 1st.
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Later this fall when container requirements go into effect for lower density buildings, those with 1 to 9 residential units.
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Approximately 70% of all trash in the city will be containerized.
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In the spring of 2025, installation of stationary on street containers will begin in Manhattan Community Board 9.
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For the 1st full district containerization program, serviced by new automated side loading trucks.
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The responses to our RFP to select a specific on street container were due just 3 days ago, and the review begins today.
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In addition to commercial and residential waste, we have also taken steps to rethink the way we contain public space trash and litter baskets, placing over 1600 of the new better bins across the city.
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With the significant help of council members who have wisely chosen to use discretionary funds to speed the spread of these new icons that stand at the vanguard of the trash revolution.
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Whereas the old mesh baskets forced New Yorkers to look at trash all day, the new baskets allow us to look to the future.
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As containerization spreads across the city, so 2 does the 2nd key front in the trash revolution, the largest and easiest curbside composting program ever.
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This program is on track to reach every single residence in all five boroughs starting the week of October 6th.
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While curbside composting programs have existed in New York city for the last decade.
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None have ever served more than approximately 40% of the city.
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When mayor Adams took office, he committed to developing a universal program that works for New Yorkers.
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And the team at DSNY is set to work developing a model built for long term sustainability.
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No more stops and starts, no more complicated rules, no more drama.
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The resulting program currently running in Brooklyn and Queens and coming to the other three boroughs this fall will be the first to reach 100 percent covered city wide, providing residents with simple universal weekly collection of leaf and yard waste food scraps, and food soiled paper products on their recycling day.
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That simplicity is the most important part of the program.
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There's no need for sign ups, special dates to remember, or specific locations to visit within limited hours.
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Simply place your material out on recycling day, your sanitation workers will collect it from your home and will ensure that it's put to good use.
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This is a composting program for all New Yorkers.
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Make the separation of compostable material easy, and people will do it.
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And we have numbers to back this up.
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Infys year 2023, DSNY diverted a record £211,000,000 of compostable material from landfills.
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An incredible increase from just over £150,000,000 the year before.
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This is a testament to the value of simple universal programs, especially given that foods only a part of our ongoing citywide rollout.
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The ease of use principle holds true for our network of nearly 400 smart composting bins across the five boroughs, where residents can drop off their compostable material 247 through an easy to use smartphone app.
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These bins are serviced 6 days a week and have proven to be very popular.
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And weeks ago, we made good on a promise to bring curbside compost collection to every department of education school, giving the next generation of composters familiarity with the ease and importance of the program.
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When the Adams administration began, only about half of schools received this service, and only about half of the next generation of composters were learning about proper separation of waste for beneficial reuse.
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Now, they all are, and they're showing their parents and guardians the way.
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Material collected through each of these initiatives, curbside residential collection, smart bins, and schools is put to benefit oil use either through composting or through anaerobic digestion.
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The department produces tens of 1,000,000 of pounds and finished compost every year at the Staten Island compost for facility, where in January mayor Adams and I cut the ribbon on a major expansion.
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That 33 acre site is now permitted to accept over £62,000,000 of food waste per year, up from just £3,000,000 prior to the expansion.
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In addition to another £60,000,000 of leap and yard waste.
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The new technology on-site can turn waste into compost in half the time it used to take, weeks rather than months.
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We are producing tens of 1,000,000 of pounds of beautiful New York City compost every year and giving it back to New Yorkers for free with a list of events available on our website.
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While the city has sufficient permitted and contracted capacity to process compostable material from a citywide program, We are currently engaged in a procurement to distribute that capacity more evenly across the region.
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Those city procurement rules limit the extent to which we can talk about future status processing infrastructure for putressible waste, beneficial use and waste equity are both key to our long term planning.
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DS and I DSNY would also like to raise the issue of commercial organic separation.
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Local law 146 of 2013 requires certain commercial establishments to separate their compostable material, but this law is now substantially at a step with the city's commitment to diversion of compostable waste.
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The commercial waste zone system will improve commercial diversion in the DSNY is requiring Carter's to charge businesses less to collect recyclables and compostable material than to collect trash.
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But we also urge the council to consider an update that would allow DS and Y to require source separation at all commercial establishments in line with the progress made in residential diversion.
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This seems obvious to me.
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Taken together, reform of commercial organics and the city wide wraparound residential services will make our streets and our air cleaner.
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DSNY is also moving full speed ahead with a third era defining overhaul of how the trash is managed in New York City.
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Our implementation of the commercial waste zone program described in local law 199 of 2019.
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This law was designed to reform the commercial waste hauling system by establishing new safety standards for workers in the commercial carding industry.
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Improving service for businesses, increasing diversion rates, and reducing vehicle miles traveled as well as harmful emissions from waste hauling vehicles.
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In January, we announced the entire suite of contract awards for this program available on our website, and the 1 of New York City's 20 nonexclusive commercial waste zones will come online in the second half of this year in Corona, Elmhurst, and Jackson Heights.
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Businesses will be able to register new carding contracts beginning in early September and must do so by January 2 2025.
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DSNY has a substantial outreach and education program planned for before and during that period.
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This program will add legal safeguards to the commercial carting industry that will protect workers, business owners, and our environment.
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We're talking about 12,000,000 miles fewer traveled by commercial carting vehicles.
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And making good on a promise from when this program was created.
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Businesses will pay less for the collection of recyclables and compostable material than they do for trash.
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A city wide average of 32% less for recycling and 18% less for compostable material.
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That means businesses will have a meaningful financial incentive to separate their waste properly.
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Containerization composting in the implement of commercial waste zones are major changes in the way the department performs our work, but they also necessitate changes in the ways New Yorkers conduct their work around waste.
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And in addition to education and outreach, there must be a robust enforcement component of each of these programs.
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The Department of Sanitation will never enforce for enforcement's sake.
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But as part of the trash revolution, we are not afraid to hold property owners accountable to the very basic requirements we have around cleanliness.
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The legal requirements to maintain a clean sidewalk, to remove litter and debris, from the first 18 inches into the street and to set out ways at the proper time and in the proper receptacles.
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In 2023, Our enforcement of these critical rules around cleanliness was up over 60% compared to the year prior, and we target ongoing enforcement in the highest density parts of the city doubling down on this council's designations around rat mitigation zones.
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In addition to enforcing the basic rules of cleanliness outside every property in the city, we have implemented new strategies to combat 2 specific quality of life offenses.
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The first is our camera enforcement approach to the scourge of illegal dumping, a crime wherein dumpers use cars, vans, or trucks to dispose of everything from construction debris to entire suites of office equipment to regular bags of trash.
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This occurs in areas that dumpers considered to be out of the way, like dead end streets, underpasses, and perhaps most distressingly alongside cemeteries.
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For many years, the Department of Sanitation did not have a meaningful enforcement strategy against the crime of illegal dumping.
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We just cleaned over and over again, and the behavior continued to afflict neighborhoods like East New York, Glendale, and Hunt's Point.
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We have significantly stepped up illegal dumping surveillance in the last 2 years.
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Last year, we issued more than 300 summonses for illegal dumping, an increase of about 70% over 2022.
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Each of those summonses starts at $4000 at the cost of cleaning up the mess also passed along to the damper.
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And we impound the vehicle involved.
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The dumpers are unnoticed that they won't get away with it any longer.
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The same is true for people who use our streets for free storage for abandoned or derelict vehicles.
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Under state law, DSNY has jurisdiction for the removal of vehicles identified as derelict meaning without license plates and with a value of under $1250 with authority for removal of vehicles outside this category residing with the NYPD.
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But for the public, this distinction is meaningless.
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Who knows the value of a car that has taken up space outside their home sometimes for years without moving.
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Who needs to know which agency to call?
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That's why in 2023, DSNY and NYPD launched an Intel Agency abandoned vehicle task force to cut through the red tape.
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A team of 5 NYPD officers were assigned to DSNY to partner with our derelict vehicle operations team so that when we encounter vehicles on the street, the do not meet the derelict criteria, but qualify as abandoned.
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We can action them then and there.
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Thanks to these efforts in 2023, increased our derelict vehicle removal by 43% and removed nearly 8000 vehicles that calendar year.
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In 2024, we are on pace to dwarf that number.
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All of you celebrate this work, and most of you ask for more of this work.
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You speak often about the concerns of your constituents related to the cleanliness of commercial corridors and other dirty conditions in your districts.
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But there are gaps in our enforcement authority.
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Areas where the Department of Sanitation does not have the tools we need to do our jobs.
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We want to get the job done, and there are 3 bills awaiting action by this council that give us that would give us the tools that we for sure need.
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Intro97, sponsored by Council Member Ng, will provide a meaningful escalator in fines for the small number of commercial property owners who repeatedly allow filth to congregate on our streets and sidewalks.
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Intro 11, sponsored by council member, Botcher, will expand the hours of the day that DSNY may enforce commercial cleanliness rules.
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An intro 57 sponsored by council member, Jose, will codify and clarify the penalties for failure to containerize commercial waste.
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1 of the most successful cleanliness programs underway in the city In 2023, over 1600 locations received 4 or more summonses for dirty area.
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And nearly 500 were issued 10 or more.
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3 dozen were issued 50 or more.
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Take this commercial location.
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Hold on.
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Alright.
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Take this commercial location, which has received 37 summonses year to date.
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And despite that, when sanitation officers
Mohamed Attia
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checked
Jessica Tisch
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the site on Tuesday, this is what they found.
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Both littering our public spaces.
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And here, you can see a business that has been summoned for flouting set out requirements 34 times.
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And still hasn't gotten the message.
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Clearly, the escalating fine structure is not currently steep enough to act as a disincentive to repeat offenders.
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Enforcement is not about generating revenue.
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It is about compliance.
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But under the law today, bad actors can simply look at DSNY Enforcement as the cost of doing business.
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That has to change, and that change starts with you.
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Cleanliness is a shared responsibility.
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We urge the council to pass intro 97 and implore the committee on sanitation and solid waste management to vote intros 11 57 out of committee.
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We are also asking for your support with a home rule message for state state legislative bill.
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The bill would allow the Department of Sanitation to engage in automated enforcement against alternate side parking violators letting the mechanical brooms do their important work.
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Automated enforcement has worked well for the MTA and the bus lanes.
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And it can do the same for clean streets.
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These bills are moving with the support of a very broad coalition of state legislative leaders and we need your support in the council as well.
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But even as we pursue a wide variety of innovative programs and even with the challenging fiscal climate, we are not slowing down on our core cleanliness work, and neither the people who create the need for that work.
0:23:36
This area of abandoned railway along Staten Island's North Shore has been allowed to become the definition of a no man's land over a period of decades.
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With dumpers easily climbing the fence, and Staten Islanders had been left with little choice, but to conclude that no one cares.
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That must end.
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The DSNY targeted neighborhood task force began a major operation at this site last week and we will not stop until it is clean.
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I will now discuss the executive budget, which includes $1,985,000,000 in expense funds in fiscal year 2024 and $1,89,000,000 in fiscal year 2025.
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Reflecting increases of $83,700,000 $26,000,000 respectively from the budget adopted last June.
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The fiscal year 2025 budget includes 1,130,000,000 for personal services to support a total budgeted headcount of 9476 full time positions, including 7 844 uniform positions and 1632 civilian positions.
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And $756,700,000 for other than personal services or OTPS.
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DSNY's fiscal year 2025 executive budget includes $3,360,000,000 in capital funding in a 10 year plan, $1,180,000,000 of which is for garages and facilities, $2,060,000,000 for equipment, $64,900,000 for IT and $59,800,000 for solid waste management infrastructure.
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The capital budget includes funding for several major facilities projects, including $487,000,000 in funding for the construction of a new garage for Bronx Districts 9, 1011 with demolition.
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283,000,000 in additional funding for the construction of a new garage for Queens District 1, with designs slated to begin next year, upgrades to the facility that serves as the home for the Bronx District 12 garage.
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Which has an overall budget of $55,500,000 and will begin construction next year.
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And the $20,000,000 finishing touches of the $213,000,000 build out for the brand new home for Staten Island's District 3, which is slated to be completed next spring.
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We look forward to taking your questions about the end of the era of the black bags in the city of New York and the FY 2025 executive budget Thank you.