David Atkin seeks clean-idle exemption for interior demolition trucks
Atkin represents unionized interior demolition contractors and says their trucks are required to be certified clean idle. He asks for an exemption when trucks must run engines at commercial buildings to wait for debris containers, similar to California's clean-idle rules.
David Atkin.
Okay.
I'm a council that represents.
Okay.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
That's you there.
This is you on paper.
Okay.
All right.
Fair enough.
And so, okay, you're with the Interior Demolition Contractors Association.
We appreciate you being here today.
Wait for the sergeant's prompt and begin with your good testimony.
Thank you.
The Interior Demolition Contractors Association.
Yes, talk right into the mic.
Make sure the light is on.
Okay, thank you.
The Interior Demolition Contractors Association.
A little louder, a little louder.
Okay, is it not for profit?
Speak like a contractor.
I'm an attorney.
It's not for profit.
That's a mistake.
That's a mistake.
Wait, I'm a lawyer.
What are you talking about?
I meant lawyers on that side.
Yeah.
It's a not-for-profit trade association that represents unionized interior demolition contractors.
Our members are generally family-owned small businesses.
They perform interior demolition work within commercial buildings and carding work for commercial clients.
Our members provide middle-class jobs for our workers because they're union.
Our members use certified clean idle trucks for all of our pickups.
Our trucks are regulated by the New York City Business Integrity Commission, where it's mandated we...
purchase or upgrade our trucks.
Those upgrades are extraordinarily expensive to our small businesses.
As a point of reference, the Certified Clean Idle Program was first introduced in the state of California.
We thank everybody for their efforts with regard to updating the idling law.
We agree with many of those efforts.
We do need to raise some issues that are unique to our industry.
When our members operate at a commercial building, they face particular hardships.
First, we pick up the debris when the building owners allow us to.
This is up to them, not us.
That is generally on off hours when there is little or no pedestrian traffic.
The debris is loaded into containers.
Second, we must wait for the loaded containers to come down to the loading dock or to the curb.
Those containers use the building's elevators.
We cannot continuously shut down our engines between loads.
We just can't do it because the time, if you shut your truck down, it takes time to regenerate and get up to full power.
You just cannot do that.
Please continue for a few moments.
I was playing with you before.
So we're asking for an exemption.
Which is similar to what the state of California has, for certified clean idle trucks, for when you're at a commercial building, that you have an exemption for when you're doing what we do, which is interior work.
And we would say that, as the state of California says, when you're near...
a facility like a school, of course that exemption should not apply, and there are going to be multiple tickets going to be issued.