A Flatbush senior citizen was slapped with a $100 summons from one city agency last week for not cleaning up another city agency’s mess.
A Sanitation Department enforcement agent wrote 78-year-old Asher Ohevshalom the costly fine for not removing six 100-pound Norway Maple tree trunks left outside his E. 27th St. home by a Parks Department crew that dismembered the dying hardwood.
“I’m angry, I’m really upset with the situation,” said Ohevshalom, according to his granddaughter Esther Yousef, who translated his comments from Farsi to English.
“They said they’d come with a truck and pick it up and they never showed up.”
Ohevshalom, who immigrated to Brooklyn from Iran 19 years ago, is a retired garment worker who survives on a $550-a-month Social Security check – and said the $100 fine is too steep for him to pony up.
“I can’t pay,” he said.
Ohevshalom and neighbors placed at least two 311 complaints this month about the 20-foot-tall tree, which was rotting and dangerously teetering over his driveway, next to a city-owned guardrail on his dead-end block.
Two weeks ago, a Parks Department crew chopped down the tree, collecting all the branches but leaving behind half a dozen massive trunks.
When Ohevshalom and neighbors complained last week, Parks officials said they’d bring a shredder to chop up the wood – but not before a Sanitation agent fined Ohevshalom for a “loose rubbish” violation.
An aide to City Councilman Mike Nelson (D-Flatbush) said Department of Sanitation agents should use common sense before writing tickets.
“When you see the tree stumps on the ground, you should take a look and say, ‘Hey, was this dumped here by the homeowner or done by the Parks Department?'” said Chaim Deutsch.
When asked about the tree trunks, Sanitation Department spokesman Keith Mellis said the agency would investigate whether the agent went overboard.
If the agent did, said Mellis, “the department will write a letter to the Environmental Control Board requesting that the notice of violation be dismissed, and the department will reeducate the officer on the proper issuance of that violation.”
A Parks Department spokeswoman promised the tree pieces would be picked up today.
(Source: NY Daily News)
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3 Responses
There seems to be an awful lot of ‘deadwood’ in Brooklyn.
Parks Dept. should start on 65th Street, than 13th Avenue, continue through Crown Heights, Williamsburgh and Flatbush.
Problem is however that some of the workers in Parks Dept. are themselves ‘deadwood’.
Hmm.
“the department will reeducate the officer on the proper issuance of that violation.”
Let them try to reeducate them to keep snowplows down during a snow storm. . . .
REeducate implies that had some education to begin with. I highly doubt that. What they need to do is give them the education that they should have gotten when they were in Police academy the first time.