Sanchez asks for litter basket removal numbers for misuse

Thank you, Councilmember Wilson.

And just staying on this topic real quick, do we have an exact number of how many litter baskets the department removed due to misuse, so depositing household or commercial refuse or liquid waste in baskets

in 2025, as well as how many it's removed in 2026 for those same reasons?

We don't have those numbers.

And in large part, this practice was, in effect, more than 10 years ago.

And, you know, sometime around the end of the de Blasio administration, the decision was made by previous commissioners to cease that practice.

So if you go back in.

News reports, for example, there was a number of baskets removed in central Harlem at one point, I think around 2017, 2018.

And that caused prior administrations to really rethink if this is the right approach.

There were also even going back further to 2013, 2014.

in parts of Ridgewood along specifically Fresh Pond Road.

I know that there was a lot of consternation around removed litter baskets.

And so sometime around the end of the de Blasio administration, the practice from wide scale removals to much more targeted removals was made.

And, you know, I know that the number of baskets removed has fallen off pretty substantially since then.