Summer in the City Means Fewer Jobs, More Trash

LYNN SCHENKMAN

THE NEW YORK Department of Sanitation (NYDS) is planning to reduce pickups for trash and recyclables and to cut jobs to save millions of dollars. By this summer, garbage pickups in Queens, Staten Island and some districts in Brooklyn and the Bronx will be reduced from two times per week to once per week.

Collections in Manhattan will remain unchanged at three times per week, and so will pickups in two districts of Brooklyn. Approximately seven districts in Manhattan will remain on a weekly recycling schedule, but everywhere else will have recycling pickups every other week. According to NYDS spokesperson Kathy Dawkins, the department still is working out the details of the plan but expects it to be in place by July 1, 2003.

Dawkins says the reduced trash pickup schedule should save the city $12 million per year and the reduced recycling schedule should save an additional $11 million. Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration faces a $6.4 billion budget deficit in 2004.

Notices for 500 layoffs were mailed, and at press time, Carmen Cognetta, council to the Sanitation and Solid Waste Management Committee, had confirmed the layoffs.

Cognetta adds that the city frequently announces how much each agency will need to cut, or in better years, how much it could add. Future budgetary predictions are worsening, he says.