An armored car company that the Department of Environmental Protection exempted from city anti-idling laws in 2024 now faces enforcement again after DEP found it "non-compliant" with fleet electrification benchmarks set as a condition for the original exemption, officials said.
DEP revoked GardaWorld Cash's idling law variance on Feb. 13 due to "noncompliance with the number of vehicles that required anti-idling and electrification," a DEP spokesman told Streetsblog via email.
The company had committed to electrify 50 percent of its fleet in exchange for the variance, which did not apply to idling during "actions outside regular duties, including — but not limited to — authorized meal breaks," the spokesman said.
Enacted during the Lindsay administration to coincide with the first Earth Day, the city's anti-idling law was sparsely enforced before the launch of the Citizens Air Complaint Program in the late 2010s. The program allowed everyday New Yorkers to submit complaints about idling commercial vehicles and receive a portion of any resulting fine paid by the companies.
DEP has doled out hundreds of thousands of idling fines via citizen enforcement. Under Mayor Eric Adams and Commissioner Rohit Aggarwala, the agency leveraged the fines to win fleet electrification commitments from several armored car companies, most of which have expired.
DEP revoked Garda's variance after the company failed to demonstrate progress towards 50-percent fleet electrification as required by its variance, a DEP spokesman said. Of the seven armored car companies that received variances from DEP under Aggarwala, only Garda had its revoked due to non-compliance. One, IBI Armored, did not accept the variance. Four others — Ferrari Express, Loomis, Secure Cash and Shields Business Solutions — accepted variances that later expired. The seventh, Brinks, received a 60-day extension on its variance, which expires on April 2, as it addressed an issue with one of its vehicles.
DEP denied that the revocation had anything to do with a lawsuit Garda filed in January to nix around 1,100 summons it received before the variance began.
In its suit, Garda claimed it should not have to follow the idling law at all because DEP "had a long standing position that armored vehicles engaged in service stops were entitled to the processing device exemption." The company cited a 2018 email where DEP said its policy at the time was not to issue violations when "there is an official work related reason for the vehicle idling."
Reached via email, a Garda spokesperson who declined to provide a name reiterated the firm's claim that "anti-idling requirements should not apply to armored carriers," but insisted that its entire New York City fleet is either electric or equipped with so-called "anti-idling technology," so the DEP variance "was no longer necessary."
The company owed more than $2.6 million in unpaid fines and fees tied to idling violations, according to data tracked by citizen idling enforcement activists. DEP has agreed to waive Garda's fines associated with not showing up to court hearings for its violations, bringing its balance down to around over $1 million.
Aggarwala, who left DEP at the end of January, acknowledged Garda's claims in a Jan. 28 letter informing the company of the revocation of its variance, a portion of which DEP shared with Streetsblog.
"Because you have not made the necessary progress by the deadline, the variance is hereby suspended as of the date of this letter," he wrote. "Further, while the following is not the basis for this action, we note that because you claim that you have no more than 31 vehicles in your NYC fleet, all of which are EVs or have acceptable anti-idling installed, your operations should be in compliance with the law, and accordingly you should have no need for a variance."
Yet the company's flouting of the city's rules banning commercial idling persists, as demonstrated by the six violations it received during the variance period for "actions outside regular duties."
Citizen anti-idling enforcer-activists commended DEP for revoking the variance, which they opposed from the get-go, and called on the Mamdani administration to "end all similar variances." DEP under Aggarwala handed its largest idling variance ever to the coach bus company Academy in December.
"The New York Clean Air Collective applauds DEP’s revocation of Garda’s license to pollute our air," the group said in a statement. "The most effective deterrence to illegal idling is holding corporations accountable for breaking the law. Granting certain companies loopholes from the city’s air pollution laws not only harms New Yorkers due to increased air pollution, but also unfairly discriminates against their law-abiding competitors."
