NYC’s garbage fix is making problems

It’s reasonable to ask New York residents and businesses to put their garbage in bins and lock them tight, to keep the rats at bay, as is now required. But now Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) are being asked to spend thousands of dollars on those containers.

Not only is that unfair, it shows a remarkable lack of understanding of what BIDs do. This is a full-on collision between the rights of government and these quasi-public associations that have been around for 50 years and provide a valuable service, working to keep our streets safer and cleaner so New Yorkers can shop comfortably.

Let me go back to the beginning.

BIDs were created to help local business districts, such as Arthur Ave. in the Bronx, where I am chairman, or in any one of dozens of other neighborhoods, including especially crowded centers of the city, like Times Square.

You know Arthur Ave. — the city’s last thriving Little Italy, with restaurants, cafes and food and specialty stores lining both sides of the street, and the side streets beyond. Keeping it clean and safe is one of the keys to our decades of success.

Our folks provide security and act as an addition to the cleanup efforts of the Sanitation Department. No one orders us to do this. We supplement the core services of the city and pay for it ourselves with funds assessed to local businesses.

For decades, our workers have swept the streets and then put the refuse in bags next to the garbage pails on street corners.

It was all so very simple.

Then, a year and a half ago, the city demanded that we place our refuse in containers and required that we buy the containers ourselves — for as much as $5,000 a pop for one that can hold dozens of bags of garbage.

For us on Arthur Ave., when you add in installation and transportation and maintenance costs, as well as liability insurance, that brings us close to $40,000 for the six containers we’d probably need — and our annual BID assessment is $440,000.

That’s a lot for us, but for the city it’s not even a rounding error in a $115 billion budget and $100 billion capital budget.

We had some questions. Who would pay for them? What are the liability issues?

We raised these questions with city officials when the edict was issued, and the answer was… silence.

What are our options? We are not a city agency, we are not real estate owners, we are not the general public: we are an organization that supports businesses. We have no obligation to clean streets. The garbage we pick up isn’t created by businesses — which are mandated to clean up their own garbage. Rather, it is generally curbside refuse created by the general public.

If it becomes too onerous to do the cleanup, we can put it up to a board vote and depending on the outcome focus our efforts more on security or promotion.

The days of putting our garbage in bags on the street are set to end on Aug. 1, although tickets won’t be issued until the new year.

There are several ironies here. To begin with, the city recently replaced all those corner garbage cans. Why didn’t they install containers next to them at the same time? Smaller ones where we could have safely stored our bags for pickup. So simple!

And then I read that the City Council allocated $9.3 million for small, countertop composting containers and distributed 150 each to Council members to give to their constituents. That’s basically one for every 1,000 residents, but who’s counting?

The city and the City Council wasted an opportunity, and while I have an opinion on the money spent for composting containers, I cannot understand how these same decision makers didn’t see the value of providing funding for containers for the 76 BIDs across this city as we voluntarily do the work of sanitation and security, the things we all as taxpayers assume is the core mission of our government.

Madonia, a former chief of staff to Mayor Mike Bloomberg, is chairman of the Belmont Business Improvement District.