In an Op-Ed that ran in amNY in May,
Matthew W. Daus, Esq. argued that New York City’s Citizen’s Air Complaint Program (CACP) – which lets New Yorkers submit videos of commercial vehicles violating anti-idling laws to collect a bounty – needs to be reconsidered. The City uses the footage to issue fines between $350 to $2,000, and participants collect 25% of each ticket the City wins.
According to Daus, a former Chair of the city’s Taxi & Limousine Commission, the top “snitches” have racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in bounties, and the City now collects tens of millions annually through the program.
“The profit incentive created by the bounty program distorts enforcement priorities and leads to arbitrary enforcement,” explained Daus, who is also the founder and chair of the Windels Marx Transportation Practice Group. “For instance, the bus-operating subsidiaries and affiliates of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) are not subject to any civil penalties, so the Idling Warriors focus exclusively on the smaller number of buses operated by private companies. The buses owned by private companies are just as much ‘mass transportation’ as are the buses owned by the MTA. Private companies often operate the same bus models as the MTA. Yet, bounty hunters focus only on the private companies. Furthermore, the CACP is so unfairly administered that it leads to fundamental due process questions. The videos are often incomplete and unreliable. Bus companies cannot cross-examine the complainants. The City takes more than a year to issue the summonses, which makes it difficult or impossible to find records that could provide a defense. These are basic elements of due process that the City could fix, but it has chosen not to.
“The City’s administration of this bounty program is an open invitation to fleet owners to form a class action to challenge the CACP as an unconstitutional delegation of enforcement authority and denial of due process,” he added. “It is time for the industries adversely affected by this law – which has turned out to be more about ‘green dollars’ than ‘greening the environment’ – to hit the pause button.”
Source: amNY
