 New York City, it's your mayor, Eric Adams. Welcome to the Get Stuffed Done cast. Let's get to it. Welcome back to another episode of our Get Stuffed Done podcast. And you cannot say Get Stuffed Done without Jessica Tish. I mean, you know, some days on our 8 a.m. briefings, she's always coming up with some new initiative, some new innovative ways of doing things. And people say all the time, you know, what is she gonna do with garbage? What does she knows about keeping the street clean? But they don't know your long record. I remember the first time I saw you in action, you were in the New York City Police Department. Bill Bratton was the commissioner. And all of this technology that police officers are using, you just went in and transformed that agency into a place of innovation, new ways of fighting crime, new ways of communicating the cell phones, all of those things that people thought they were actually impossible, you made it happen. And so when we were able to bring you on board and now moving to an agency that's so important, how do we keep our city clean? My first question is, why did you want to do that job? Sanitation is the essential service. I mean, God blessed the fire department, but most New Yorkers can go their whole lives if they're lucky without ever having to interact with or rely on the services of the fire department. But every New Yorker, every single day has to rely on the services of the sanitation department. If we don't do our jobs for one day, everyone in the city notices. If we don't do our jobs for two or three days, that's called a public health crisis. And in my 15 years in government, I have liked working on ways to deliver essential services to New Yorkers better with a focus on customer service. And that was the enormous opportunity that the sanitation department presented because in New York City, we haven't really changed the way we manage trash in decades. So the place is really ripe for innovation. So true. And when I enjoyed each time you rolled out a new initiative, it's clear that you didn't go to DSNY with the attitude of, let's just make sure that the truck deliveries are on time. You went in with a whole new energy of how do we produce a better product? And that is something, the excitement I have every day. When you look at this basic blank canvas and say, okay, how are we going to paint a new picture? And just initiative after initiative, you have rolled out of you coined this slogan, Rats Don't Run the City, and everyone knows I hate rats. Tell me about that whole approach to fighting rodents. Okay, well, as you know, you're keeping us very busy fighting rats. And over the past several months, we've rolled out a number of major initiatives aimed at targeting the rats. I think one of the key ones was changing the amount of time that trash spends on the streets of our city every day. So to frame this, every day, New Yorkers leave out 24 million pounds of trash on our curbs. We know that one third of that is food. Food is also rat food. So the big bags of black trash bags that sit on our curbs historically for more than 14, 16 hours a day, they represented the all night, all you can eat buffet for rats. And we wanted to shut that down. So in New York City, historically, the set out time for trash has been 4 p.m. 4 p.m. is the earliest set out time of any major city in the world, not just in the country. And so one of the things we said we wanted to do was shrink the amount of time that the black bags spend on the street to shut down that all night, all you can eat buffet for rats. And so we asked New Yorkers to set out their trash later at 8 p.m. rather than 4 p.m. They can set it out at 6 p.m. If they put it in a container. And in the department, we completely transformed the way that we do our collection of that trash. We're doing now almost 30% of all of our collection on our midnight shift, rather than our 6 a.m. shift. And our morning shift, we're starting earlier, five o'clock in the morning. And one of the things about having fresh eyes coming into the department is, in the department, the motto was always, well, we need to be clean by midnight. Looked at that, I was like, clean by midnight? That means the trash has been on the streets for more than 24 hours. We need to be clean by 9 a.m. I mean, this is New York City. And so we've totally overhauled the way that we manage the 24 million pounds of trash every day. And as you know, we're also looking at ways to expand the use of containers in New York City. You know, well said. So what's fascinating is that you stated that the cleanliness and how people felt about being clean added with the roading issue laid to bear on how, or one of the major contributors was how long food stayed on the street. And so your goal was, how do we get trash off the street as quickly as possible to give the aesthetics that this is a clean city, but also to deal with a roading issue? Yeah, and that's a very important point that you made, Mayor. It is about the rats. We do need to get that rat food off of the streets. But it's also about the way the city looks and feels. When people look at our streets, it's not just litter. It's the 24 million pounds of trash that used to sit on the curbs 16, 18 hours a day. And by shrinking the amount of time that the bags spend on the street, we're making it so it's not there in the morning when you're taking your kids to school or at night when you're coming home from work. You don't want people to see New York as trash city. And that's why we're dramatically changing the way we manage all of that trash. You're looking at a real cosmic shift also with containers. That also solves two problems. Number one, dealing with the visual issue and rodents when you have a good container. Tell me about that. So you have us very busy looking at how to containerize New York City. And I wanna be very clear that there are different forms of containers. Containers can come in the form of individual bins, but they can also come in the form of shared containers that sit out on the street. So if anyone's traveled to Europe or parts of South America or parts of Asia, for the past 10 years, those countries and cities in those countries have really innovated in the space of containerization. And New York City hasn't, we've talked about it for a long time. So under this administration, we've pushed forward a number of containerization issues where we've started programs where we started to dip our toe into containerization. We've worked with business improvement districts to put containers for their use. We have a residential pilot of containerization going and we're writing a report now that details a full plan for how to containerize New York City using both individual bins where appropriate and shared containers where appropriate. Lovely, lovely. And when I think about my time visiting Greece as well as Israel, Buenos Aires, the team went down to look at, you're seeing all over the globe, people realizing that it's about containerizing their trash and their garbage to do the best way of making that happen. Absolutely, and it's wild to me that you look in Europe and so many cities have containerized and in the United States, no one has. No major city has containerized and under your leadership, I'd like to push New York City to be the first major city in the United States to really embrace containerization. You know, you really did your rollout, I believe it's today or yesterday, telling those who, I love dogs, I adore dogs, but I don't like stepping in dog ways. We've been hearing a lot of 3-1-1 complaints, so you did a real public campaign around telling dog owners, for the most part, just do what's right as a good citizen and pick up after your dog. Tell me about that campaign. It was sort of risky. It was a little risky, but I think that to get New Yorkers' attention, you need to speak to them in a language they understand. And I think too often in government, the what ifs win out. I think it's important to think through the implications of what you're doing, but when you have the right message, not to be scared away by the what ifs. So our ad campaign says to New Yorkers, don't leave it on the sidewalk with some very graphic photos of dogs leaving their dog waste on the sidewalk. One of them says, it has a picture of a dog. It says, until they can, it's on you. Don't leave it on the sidewalk. But we also have a great one that's aimed at litterers, who we call garbage New Yorkers. And we say to other New Yorkers, if you see someone litter, tell them where to stick it. In the litter basket, of course. And you also targeted the illegal dumping. People don't realize that there are those who intentionally do whatever work they do or do whatever renovations that they do at home or what have you. And they intentionally dump their litter on our streets. But you've come after them. We have come after them and we have come after them hard. And when I took this job about a year ago, I would tour districts with council members. Now, illegal dumping is not something that affects every community, but the communities that if it affects generally the underserved parts of the city, it affects them profoundly. It is a theft of public space. And it's basically someone usually from out of state or a crooked contractor who says, no one's gonna care about the residents of East New York. I can dump my waste here. Well, Mayor Adams, I know that you care, I care. And the entire department of sanitation cares. And my background is at the NYPD, as you mentioned, in IT. I deployed the citywide camera system with a great team at the NYPD. And when I saw the problems of illegal dumping, I said, well, geez, this is the most obvious use case for cameras because these council members know exactly where the dumping occurs in their neighborhoods. And so all you had to do was put cameras up in locations known for illegal dumping. And what do you know? We started to catch dumpers right and left. For the first time, New York City has a strategy to address the problem of illegal dumping other than just coming back later and cleaning it up. No, so important. And having those proactive responses to longstanding aggravating problems is just so important. You know, one of the initiatives you did, that's probably my favorite, of curbside composting. Because you sort of defied the logic out in Queens on the areas that actually were leading in composting. Many people thought it wasn't possible. Share that with us. When I first met with you when I took this job, you told me you were into composting. You had watched and tracked the drama of curbside composting going into effect, being taken back, being rolled out, not being rolled out, and you told me you wanted a curbside composting program that did two things. That was cost-effective, meaning something we could scale citywide, and effective, meaning a program that New Yorkers actually use. And so we piloted a program in the borough of Queens during three months in the fall. And that program was not only cost-effective, meaning it cost one-third the price of old curbside composting programs, but it was effective because it was mass market. We went door-to-door in Queens. We didn't talk to Queens residents about methane. They wouldn't have given us the time of day. We talked to them about rats and how all of that food in their trash bags, if they just put it in a container and leave it out on their recycling day, it will get rid of the rats. And instead of sitting in a landfill for decades, producing methane, we could also make soil out of it. And so I think the practical messaging about rats and yard waste really sunk in with New Yorkers and the results were extraordinary. We diverted 13 million pounds of organic material from landfill in three months. And the winners, the districts that really did the best, Jamaica and St. Albans beat out all of the districts that had been doing curbside composting for 10 years, all of them combined with the amount of material that they diverted. Wow, and you're so right. It was about speaking to people and not at people. Yes. And showing that how we could deal with a real issue, because everyone comes with the philosophical approaches about how do we continue to improve our environment, which we all want to do, but people have real problems. They wanted to know, how do I get rid of these rats? How do I get rid of the problems that are in front of me right now? And they responded to that accordingly. And this gets back to something that you always push us on, which is treating New Yorkers as our customers. When Nike wants to sell a pair of shoes, they speak to the potential customer in ways to make it attractive. Right, right. And that's how we're trying to speak to New Yorkers about composting, about leaving dog poop on the sidewalk, about littering. Love it, love it, love it. Big surprise this winter, where the heck was the snow? You know, I liked getting in the snow truck and driving around, you know. I didn't do any of my great sanitation stuff. We didn't have, did we have one snow press conference? We did not have one snow press conference. And the closest thing we had to a winter weather emergency, which was actually a really big deal, was this crazy flash freeze that we had right before Christmas on a very busy travel day. But no, so one of the problems that that's caused for me is we bought 700 million pounds of salt. The good news, Mayor, is that next year, we're not gonna have to buy any salt. But the bad news for me is right now I'm figuring out where to store all of the salt that we didn't use, but it did save the city a lot of money that it didn't snow. So now what happens when we have that great buildup of salt? Is it, we can still use it? It doesn't. We can use it next year. We store it in our salt sheds and we've identified other locations that the sanitation department runs where we can store all the salt. So it's all good for next year. Got it. There was a real concern around a bill that was coming out of Albany concerning where we have to get our salt from. Can you give me the background on that bill and why it was important that the governor heard us and it was a good intention but it would have done some damage to the city? Yeah, there was a bill that was being considered in Albany that the governor really helped us on. And that bill would have constrained where we can buy salt from. Today, we buy our salt from a Chilean company and we get four or five barge trips a year of that 700 million pounds of salt. If we had to change providers as that bill would have required, instead of four or five barge trips a year, we would have required like 20,000 truck trips to schlep the salt into New York City. And so the governor was a fantastic partner in helping us address what could have been a real problem for New York City. So it was a good intention of trying to purchase locally but it wasn't a practical. We were actually going to hurt the environment by having more truck trips, diesel. It was counterproductive. It was counterproductive to say nothing of the logistics of trying to truck salt in when the city is shut down with a snowstorm. No, it's still true. So now what's the future? What do you have up your sleeves? Cause you're always coming up with some new thought process. What do you see in some of the endeavors that are in front of you? So Mayor, I am obsessed with cleaning up the city. I think that New Yorkers noticed during the pandemic that the city got meaningfully dirtier. And over the past year, we have launched some incredible cleanliness initiatives that rethink the city's approach to cleanliness. So we already discussed how we managed the 24 million pounds of trash, but you have allowed us to run the highest level of cleanliness service that this city has ever seen. Our litter baskets are being emptied more than they've ever been emptied before. Our streets are being swept more than they've ever been swept before. And you've also allowed us to think about new ways to solve old bureaucratic messes. So one of the things we did is we said, there are 1500 locations citywide in almost every neighborhood of the city, underpasses, overpasses, greenways. They're the dirtiest parts of every neighborhood. They're no man's lands, but they were no man's lands because no one was responsible for cleaning them. You gave us the ability to clean them and you cleaned up that bureaucratic mess. And there's another thing that I don't think anyone knows about yet, which is we're solving a bureaucratic mess around how the city deals with bureaucracy. So for 20 years, when a property owner would call 311 and request a cleanup of graffiti, that 311 request would go to the Department of Sanitation, but then the Department of Sanitation wasn't responsible for actioning it. It was another city agency. And so what you've allowed us to do is consolidate the way that we manage graffiti removal in the city. We started about two weeks ago and the results are incredible. We get a thousand calls for graffiti removal a month in New York City. We can manage that given our capacity. We are racing through the backlog. And so I think New Yorkers are gonna start to see excellent service when they call 311 for graffiti removal requests. Now, what is that? Is it paint over or removal? What's the easiest way? It depends on the circumstances, but there's two ways you can do it. You can paint over it or you can power wash it in certain circumstances. And we have teams out every single day, a dozen teams out every single day just doing graffiti removal in the areas, the parts of the city that need it the most. Let me know one of those days. I love going out doing field trips. So I would love to go and be part of one of those graffiti removals. One of the areas where I'm always sending you photos when I'm out with my team, highways. That is my pet peeve. Highways, you've tackled the exit ramps and it's a partnership for those who are listening. When you throw things out your car window on the highway, you may say, well, it's just one piece of paper, but multiply that by a million people. And you are really tackling the exit ramps and now you are going to start tackling the actual highways. We are, and I think that the highways are about to get a lot cleaner because the Department of Sanitation is about to unleash a team of sanitation workers who are going to be dedicated to and focused on cleaning up the highways. I mean, you send me pictures all the time when you travel on the BQA and or other highways and we're going to have teams of both litter pickers and street sweepers so that both the roadbeds and the medians and the shoulders look like New York City highways should look. Love it, love it. And you know, that's when we were going after the encampments on the city. There were a lot of encampments on the highway and a lot of encampments throughout the city and we broke it down locally and told that officer who was on patrol in his precinct in his sector that that was part of his quality of life condition. You saw an encampment, you would make sure the right system was notified so we could do a follow-through. And I used to see them on the highways all the time. People would live on the highways under the exit ramps and other places. You're not seeing that anymore. Deputy Mayor William Eisen and her team did an amazing job. 5,000 encampments, they cleaned up. And what you are doing by stopping these no-man lands, the parks, you're doing some new things with the parks as well. I know you increased the pickups. What was the focus on the parks? The focus on the parks was historically there's been one cleanup shift in the parks. And so by the middle of the day, all the cleanup resources that the city had were gone. So what's happened is we've added a second shift in the parks to provide cleanliness and cleanup services in the parks when people are done using them at the end of the day. That's a big duh. So much of this is just common sense stuff that it's incredible that this is the first time it's being done, but all of this stuff has to be done. And my great hope, Mayor, my great expectation is all of these things that we've started to do this year are gonna hit this spring and this summer. And my hope is that New Yorkers will see and feel in every borough, in every neighborhood, a meaningfully cleaner summer this summer than they saw last summer. Love it, love it. And we can't do that without the men and women. How are they? They no longer see themselves as being just forgotten. They now see themselves as part of the game. What's morale like right now with the men and women in the Department of Sanitation? The 10,000 members of the Department of Sanitation have stepped up in a major way for New Yorkers over the past year. And I think this is something that I don't often get an opportunity to share with New Yorkers, but I want them to know. Things like changing their work hours so that trash sits on the streets for less time every day. I mean, 30% of them are working on their midnight shift, coming in earlier for their morning shift. Most of them, if you're working the morning shift, they have to be out the door of their homes by four o'clock in the morning to get to work in time, all part of this effort to get the trash off the street earlier in the day. And so they've also stepped up in sustainability. I mean, they're driving the composting trucks, collecting all of the compost, and on the cleanliness. I mean, it's Department of Sanitation workers who are cleaning the 1,500 no-man's lands in the city, who are cleaning now the highways, who are managing the graffiti removal efforts. They've really stepped up big for New Yorkers, and it's really gratifying to me. And I think I speak for them that New York City and New Yorkers are beginning to see it and appreciate it. You know, they recognize it. And I probably spent more time in the garages throughout the city. We were together Saturday as we looked to see some of the actually containers for garbage. And when I drive through the city, those are the things I look for. When I called you Saturday and stated, I saw a picture of some bins and I wanted to get some information on and we met over at one of the garages. But that's how we should move throughout the city. Those of us who are leaders, we should be looking for how do we improve the customer experience. And I really want to thank you because no one has done it better. You have improved the customer experience and you have just started. I'm sure that as you move forward in the years to come, there's going to be some great things we could expect from the Department of Sanitation. So it's really good to have you on our Get Stuff Done podcast. Thank you so much for having me, Mayor. Thank you. And this is the information I wanted to share today. I hope to see you for another episode of Get Stuff Done Cast.