Mayor Adams Wants to “Get Stuff Clean” in Boro Park

By Yehudit Garmaise

Since he took office, Mayor Eric Adams has said every day that he wants to “Get Stuff Done,” and now he wants to “Get Stuff Clean,” right here in Boro Park.

Standing under the subway tracks, as the train roared overhead, at Utrecht Avenue and 44th Street today, Mayor Adams addressed the concerns of residents of Boro Park who often call into Community Board 12’s monthly meetings to ask whether something can be done to clean up the neighborhood.

“The residents of this community have been talking about this for a long time: trash on the sidewalk, discarded equipment,” acknowledged the mayor. “There has been no real or concerted or practical response to the trash.

“Even when I served as Brooklyn’s borough president, I would walk to the corners of Boro Park and Sunset Park, and I saw residents doing what they were supposed to be doing: placing trash in the bins, but they were overflowing.

“The trash cans were spilling over.”

“Residents were doing their jobs, but we weren’t doing our jobs.”

After working for years to try to get improved service from the city’s Department of Sanitation, Community Board 12 was so grateful for the mayor’s promise to clean up Boro Park and the rest of the city, that right after the meeting, CB12 tweeted a thank you to the mayor and Deputy Mayor Meera Joshi “for coming to our district to talk about sanitation issues.”

Blaming the lack of garbage pick-ups on the failure of the city’s many agencies to properly communicate and coordinate their efforts, the mayor promised, “America’s biggest city will be America’s cleanest city.”

Mayor Adams explained that in this year’s city budget, he invested more than $14 million this fiscal year to launch “the largest clean-up effort in decades.”

Now, working together as one unit called: Team Clean NY, on Nov. 14, the city’s agencies will start scrubbing down the city.

Starting Monday, 200 additional newly-hired DSNY workers will work additional hours to clean “hotspot areas,” which are 1,000 places the city has identified that are particularly in need of “intensive clean-ups.”

“We are starting to get these areas to get them clean and keep them clean,” Mayor Adams pledged, as the NYC subway roared overhead. “This is not a ‘one and done.’

“This is the continuation of a project that is going to ensure that our city is clean.”

In addition to the mayor's efforts to clean the city’s “high visibility areas,” such as Boro Park, he also increased funding to spruce up hundreds of other locations citywide.

The ends of DOT bridges, along highways, and off-ramps are also on the city’s list of places to beautify.

“Our highways and our ramps, particularly leading from our airports are the welcoming mats for our city,” said the mayor, who didn’t like that out-of-towners coming into NYC see, as their first impressions of the city: dirty highways, and messy entry and exit ramps.”

“We can do better, and we will do better.”

To banish the citywide problem of illegal dumping, the mayor said that he will increase camera enforcement.

“We are going to zero in on and go after the small number of people in NYC who do illegal dumping,” the mayor said.

Mayor Adams, who has many times spoken about his hatred of rats, said that he provided $600,000 this year and $1 million for next year to the city’s Health Department to increase its efforts to eliminate vermin from the city.

“We are going to hire more people and create more jobs, to have fewer rodents,” Mayor Adams said. “This initiative is going to deliver results, and New Yorkers will be proud to see cleaner streets.”

Photos by: Dovid Y. Jaroslawicz