By Helen Klein
Contending that area overpasses are unacceptably dirty, Community Board 10 has voted to ask the city to revamp the cleaning procedure it uses for such areas. At the board’s January meeting, which was held in St. Anselm’s Meletia Hall, 83rd Street and Fourth Avenue, members voted overwhelmingly to recommend that the responsibility for keeping the area’s bridges and overpasses clean be transferred from the Department of Transportation (DOT) to the Department of Sanitation (DOS). The original motion was made in the new business portion of the meeting by member Stephen Harrison, who asserted, “If you walk around here, you find out that all our overpasses are consistently filthy. Right now, outside the CB 10 office, on the 86th Street overpass, it’s a disgrace to see the amount of litter, not only on the sidewalk, where it gets caught in the fence, but on the street itself.” That DOT rather than DOS does the cleaning is, opined Harrison, “bizarre.” “It’s my understanding that some community boards have requested that Sanitation take over that function,” Harrison noted. “It’s a place where Sanitation goes anyway. What’s the big deal if they leave the broom down and send a guy to take the stuff out of the fence?” Kathy Dawkins, a spokesperson for DOS, said that the agency had received the request from the board, and it was currently before the commissioner who, she noted, was, “Reviewing it. We are taking a look to see if it falls within our jurisdiction. We will get back to them.” Craig Chin, a spokesperson for DOT, also said that the agency had gotten the community board’s request.
