Cleaning Up NY’s Trash Biz
What do you know: a public official, City Councilman Robert Cornegy Jr., actually deferring to the people who’d be affected by his actions. Unlike Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia.
Cornegy — who chairs the council’s Minorityand Women-Owned Business Enterprise Task Force and once helmed its Small Business Committee — is collaborating with private-waste haulers and the businesses they serve on a bill to make the industry safer, cleaner and more efficient.
The heart of the effort seems to be a plan for new ways to collect industry info and to craft and enforce mutually agreed-on rules.
The Department of Sanitation, meanwhile, is all but ignoring the industry as it plans to split the city into zones and ban individual trucks from operating in more than one zone a night.
That’s actually a step up from an earlier plan that would’ve created mini-monopolies by assigning just one hauler to each zone.
“Everyone agrees on the importance of reforming the commercial-waste industry to increase safety and reduce environmental impacts,” Cornegy says, “but we can achieve these goals faster and more effectively” without the zones. Dividing up the city as DSNY envisions would only “harm small businesses,” he adds.
He’s right — as Los Angeles found out the hard way: Waste-carting prices and complaints there soared after the city imposed a zone plan on its haulers. “We did not project accurately,” LA City Council President Herb Wesson admits. “I was wrong on this one.”
New York’s private-trash-hauling does need reform. As a ProPublica and Voice of America exposé last week revealed, collection routes are sometimes absurdly long and difficult. Drivers race to complete routes, sometimes even running red lights, with sometimes deadly results.
It flagged one Bronx hauler, Sanitation Salvage, with allegations of labor violations: off-the-books cash payments, theft, fraud, a sham union, etc. A single driver for the company was involved in two fatal accidents in just months.
Better law enforcement is plainly just the start of what’s needed. But Commissioner Garcia’s insistence that a government bureaucracy and centrally imposed zones are necessary to show the industry how to be more efficient was always beyond arrogant. Haulers have enough economic impetus to seek efficiency on their own.
Cornegy’s approach, working with haulers and their customers to find ways to fix problems without causing more of them, is wiser. DSNY should take its cues from him.