Recycle this!

We got several calls at the paper this week from Newarkers who were steamed they received tickets for recycling violations, and that several hundred were on line to pay their fines at the municipal court. Some people even called to complain while they were on line at the payment window.

When I first went down to check it out, I ran into a police aide who wouldn't let me pass with a voice recorder I had in my pocket. There's probably some rule against bringing such devices into the court. I, however, was just going to the payment window.

The police aide didn't want to know anything about it. She insisted I take the recorder back out to my car. I had walked there from the Ledger, so that wasn't an option. When I tried to explain that I was a reporter, and in a hurry to speak to the folks who had called us, the aide again wouldn't hear me out. I tried a third time to explain my case, and was told not to raise my voice. I wasn't raising it.

The aide then left to go get a supervisor. I decided not to wait, and as I turned to leave, the aide thought I was making a move to get passed her. She even threatened to arrest me for trespassing. Having had enough of this overzealous police aide, I just kept going. "I'm leaving the building!" I yelled as I went out the exit.

I stashed my recorder behind a stoop outside, and returned into the building, where the police aide was now deep into discussion with someone. She also was ignoring a line of people waiting to enter the building.

A woman at the front of the line decided to go ahead anyway, and stuck her bag into the security scanner at the entrance. The police aide was too busy talking to notice, and didn't look at the scanner monitor as the bag went through. Three other people in front of me did the same. I went through too, again with no word from the aide.

Once inside, I found 47 people on line for the payment window. Several were charged $147 for multiple violations. They were accused of not flattening their cardboard, or tying it into bundles. Some also were charged with failing to separate their bottles and cans into plastic bags.

A woman pulled out a calculator and did the math, multiplying 47 times $147. She hit the equal sign and showed the total to her husband, "That's more than six Gs," he said.

I left to meet a resident who called me on his cell phone outside. He was a retired cop, who also had been fined. However, the summons notice he received in the mail had no specifics. He had to go to court to find out why he was being ticketed, and insisted he was being charged improperly. The city, he said, needs to say upfront what a person is being fined for. He said that when he worked as a police officer, he couldn't charge anyone without saying what the charge was for. He joined several people insisting the city was just trying to raise its revenues.

Melvin Waldrop, the city administrator in charge of sanitation services, told me that wasn't the case. He had a crew of seven inspectors, recently reassigned from writing tickets for alternate side-of-the-street parking, to recycling compliance, and the crew had written up about 5,000 violations.

The tickets, Waldrop said, were an incentive for people to recycle.

A reader wrote me an email saying she didn't think the city should be writing tickets at all, because it's not even consistent about picking up recycleables. Her recycling had not been picked up for three or four months until she called the city, she said. The call brought sanitation out once to pick up her recycling only once. The city hasn't come back since, she said.

The lady had some harsh words after that.

"If the sanitation dept. can show proven record that they pick up the trash/recycling on the scheduled day then only will i agree with giving out tickets but until then its all a scam and politics at its best, TRASH. Sincerely, ANGRY NEWARK RESIDENT," she wrote in an email.