Carr questions Anderson on benefits of CWZ for Staten Island

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair.

And Commissioner, you mentioned containerization earlier.

I just want to thank you again for extending both the funding and the grace period for individual compliance and righting a wrong of the previous administration and making sure folks have time to actually get the bins.

So thank you again for that.

I know you worked closely with the Chair and Councilmember Morano on getting that done.

With respect to Intro 911A, I think one of the things that I've been concerned about is that there's no real attendant benefit for Staten Island because it's, again, as I said in my statement, you're not resolving a problem that we had.

It was a problem that existed in other boroughs.

And more importantly, I dispute the notion that whatever benefits that do come with the program are being disrupted by...

This legislation because I'm not actually seeking to change the standards by which additional awardees would be selected.

So could you kind of describe what your concerns are from your perspective with what we're proposing here today?

Yeah, so I would dispute the notion that there's no benefit to Staten Island from commercial waste zones.

I think the benefits are

many.

And while the truck traffic concern may not have been as great on Staten Island as it was in other places, I think that there are very real concerns around safety for both workers and the public.

There are very real concerns around the lack of compliance with commercial

commercial recycling requirements and commercial organics requirements.

And I think very, very serious concerns around the kind of services that haulers that had been operating on Staten Island and across the five boroughs.

In the prior system.

And so commercial waste zones brings a number of benefits, not just reducing the total truck traffic, but that is certainly a significant one.

And the program parameters writ large, I think, bring a number of benefits to Staten Islanders.

But if there were new awardees,

they would have to comply with the requirements of the program.

If they were an existing hauler already operating, they would now have to comply with the standards that need to be met for any commercial waste zone awardee.

So I'm struggling to understand how bringing additional folks into the system for consumers to choose would...

Would denude a lot of the additional requirements that they would have to meet.

They would have to meet the same standards as any other awardee.

So I don't think that there's really a diminishment in the benefits of the CWZ.

If anything, you're just bringing more folks into compliance who may not have been before, and yet they continue to operate.

Consumers continue to have more choices.

I think that there's...