New York City sanitation officials plan to jack up fines on the owners of dirty vacant lots in an effort to cut down on the trashy eyesores.
The sanitation department wrote in a notice Monday it planned to increase fines for failure to maintain vacant lots from $100 to $250. City regulations require owners of abandoned lots to keep their property, sidewalk and 18 inches into the street free of litter and obstructions. The rule changes would also reclassify dormant or abandoned construction sites as vacant lots, opening them up to more penalties.
The plan to increase the fines comes as city data shows the sanitation department has drastically scaled back its efforts to clean vacant lots in recent years. The city cleaned just 257 of the lots last fiscal year and 101 the year before that. In the fiscal year that ended in 2023, crews cleaned 1,440 vacant lots, city data shows…