Oh, I love that you just asked that question. Do you have stats for garbage the way CompStat tracks crime? How do you measure progress on stuff like this? We’re obviously talking about an enormous area and tons of workers. So I think you’re seeing Mayor Adams’s one-city approach in action. The Department of Transportation has been incredibly helpful in getting us started up, both in terms of the equipment we use and helping us with routing. For the past month and a half, we’ve had about a hundred sanitation workers a day out there doing a full makeover. More recently, the department got jurisdiction to clean the highways, which in my opinion were absolutely filthy. And Mayor Adams came in and basically tore off that old bureaucratic agreement and said, “No, we need to give jurisdiction and responsibility for cleaning these areas to the agency whose core competency is cleaning.” And I felt a lot of support and partnership from, for example, the Department of Transportation, the Parks Department, in helping us ramp up and in transitioning that responsibility over. But there was this old agreement dating back several decades that took the jurisdiction for cleaning those parts of the city away from the Department of Sanitation and gave them to other agencies that weren’t positioned to clean them. There were certain parts of the city that really look and feel like city streets but technically aren’t considered city streets: medians, greenways, the service roads next to highways, underpasses, overpasses. What I have seen and felt over the past year that I’ve been working in this administration is a very different paradigm vis-à-vis how agencies work together. When Mayor Adams came in, he was very clear with all of us that he wanted to take a one-city approach. Did that experience help you in terms of setting up better coordination with Sanitation? Before this job, you ran the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications. One thing that’s historically been an issue is a lack of interaction between city agencies like the Department of Sanitation and the Department of Transportation. So in a short period of time, we are trying to basically play catch-up. I have long said that for the past decade or two, most cities around the world have really innovated in the ways that they handle and manage their waste. I absolutely felt that inertia, and overcoming that inertia has actually brought a lot of the energy to this department over the past year, because we want to do everything we can to change the paradigm in New York City. Did you feel that inertia when you got to the job, and to what extent has it had an impact on what you’ve tried to do so far? You were hired a month after that article came out. The greatest and richest city in the world is being embarrassed by other municipalities when it comes to nearly every facet of how we generate, sort, store, and recycle more than 12,000 tons of waste every day.” I want to read you a quote from a Streetsblog article that came out in March of last year: “In conversations with policy experts, architects, elected officials, and former city workers, one word came up repeatedly to describe the city’s relationship with garbage - inertia. She has also, unusually for an agency head, become something of a social-media personality. I spoke with her about why New York City is so uniquely gross - and her plans to de-grossify it. She has already instituted visible changes like new guidelines for when residents can set out their garbage. And his Sanitation commissioner, Jessica Tisch, a veteran of city agencies and scion of an influential New York family, has been given free rein to experiment. This has held true even when well-respected leaders like Kathryn Garcia have led the Sanitation Department.īut Eric Adams, the man who defeated Garcia for the mayoralty two years ago, seems himself to have a special interest in cleanliness, which goes beyond an obsession with rats. And while the city faces unique challenges in disposing of wastes, sclerotic bureaucracy and a lack of political will are the central roadblocks to change. The city’s garbage problem can seem intractable NYC has lagged well behind other metropolises on important measures like recycling rates and containerization, as well as the omnipresence of trash on its streets. New York City has been filthy for a very long time. Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer Photo: Getty Images
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |