BUFFALO, N.Y. — The Buffalo Common Council is cracking down on illegal dumping in the city. Councilman Mitch Nowakowski wrote a resolution that he thinks could be the answer to the city’s longtime problem.
“We really need to get tough and prosecute perpetrators, and we need to have a full-level approach to tackle this,” Nowakowski said. “It's playing Whac-A-Mole oftentimes where you are going location to location… It becomes one of those things where if you can't tackle it, there needs to come a new way of doing it.”
Nowakowski’s solution is to create a task force of both city workers and neighbors to tackle this issue together by meeting, at a minimum, every single month.
He hopes this speeds up teamwork between the city departments and replaces the current, slower, system of taking resident complaints that are passed along through several different city departments to clean up.
His idea is to create a seven-person committee of people with at least one member from the:
- Buffalo Police Department
- Department of Permits and Inspections
- Department of Public Works
- Department of Citizen’s Services
- A member of a local Block Club
He hopes this resolution does four things:
- Recommend effective penalties for illegal dumping
- Outline departmental measures to curb and police dumping
- Propose potential City investments to address the issue
- Reexamine penalties and adjudication processes to ensure accountability
Nowakowski told me the resolution will be in committees next week, then it will be voted on after those discussions.
“It’s an unfortunate and frustrating problem, so if this lets us get our departments coordinated, I think this could be a good idea,” Lovejoy District Councilman Bryan J. Bollman said.
