Thomas-Henry questions Anderson on litter enforcement and community pride

And I know I said two, but I have one more on behalf of my children.

Litter is out of control.

My babies remind me constantly.

And now that I'm a council member, say, Mommy, what are you going to do about this?

Just thinking back to when I was young, like, you knew not to throw trash on the ground.

Like, it was just, and I believe there were fines.

Like, I don't even know if we have fines anymore.

Are we doing anything proactively to encourage more New Yorkers to stop throwing their trash on the ground?

And even more specifically, as these rainstorms are coming, the drains are backing up.

There's a lot of flooding, particularly in my district and other areas of Queens, because of trash.

So I think people today still know that they shouldn't throw things on the ground.

I don't think that that has changed.

And I think it's because people, when you see trash and you're like, okay, is there?

Okay, I can just throw this down too.

Yeah.

It's part of the issue.

Our streets aren't clean to the point where you think twice before you're adding your litter.

Yeah, I fully share your children's frustration and your frustration.

You know, I think one of the things that we are...

Endeavoring to achieve is a sense of pride and ownership in our communities.

And I think that is the most effective way we can solve this problem.

Because again, I think everyone understands you are not supposed to throw things on the ground all across New York City.

And yet we see people do it.

And it is only when

And, you know, when people think that they might get called out by their neighbors or they might get called out by their kids or they see that the street's clean and if I drop this one thing on the street, it then goes from clean to dirty, that they change their perspective.

And so we are thinking through, you know, what are the many different mechanisms that we can use to achieve that sense of ownership and pride in our communities and look forward to working with you on how we can do that in your district specifically.

Thank you.

And I will just add there that there are still fines for littering.

The city council did reduce those fines pretty substantially, not this council, but in, I think, around 2019.

And we would be happy to have a conversation around increasing those.

Thank you.

Would love to have those conversations too.

And I also think we need to piggyback off of your point.

I think one of the things that I have seen in the community is it's not the older folks that are littering.

It's the new younger kids.

It's the middle schoolers, the high schoolers, because they didn't have our campaigns that we had when we were growing up.

Like we remember all the ads for don't litter, don't trash, and like all the like what it.

They didn't grow up with any of that.

So to us, that is the common knowledge.

It is the common sense.

But I don't necessarily know if it is to all the generations after us.

So maybe an opportunity for a new marketing campaign.