Fordham Road and Long Island City are two completely different neighborhoods. Fordham is the Bronx’s busiest commercial corridor with more than 300 businesses, primarily retail. Long Island City is a multi-use waterfront community including residential, commercial housing, retail and industrial.
That leads to our next point. Our sanitation services consume significant portions of our budgets, not to mention rising operational costs from insurance and inflation. For Fordham Road, it’s approximately 33 percent and in Long Island City, it’s 44 percent. Our street teams comb the neighborhood, paying special attention to servicing overflowing garbage cans, replacing the liner in the trash bins, and then leaving the bags on the sidewalk for collection.
Fourth, illegal dumping in our neighborhoods makes compliance with this new policy even more cumbersome and in essence assumes we will be blamed for any trash not containerized on the sidewalk. In the Commercial District Needs Assessment Fordham Road BID conducted last year surveying hundreds of businesses, illegal dumping and street cleanliness were in the top three concerns of the BID.