Watchdog: Corporate Polluters Are Using Loophole to Avoid City Idling Fines
The city is allowing bus and trucking companies to skirt fines for alleged citizen-issued idling violations by rescheduling the hearings for those violations in perpetuity, a top government watchdog charged on Wednesday.
“Companies whose buses, trucks, and vans received idling violations are abusing the due process proceedings … by repeatedly rescheduling hearings in different ways to avoid accountability,” the watchdog, Reinvent Albany, charged in a new analysis of publicly available data. “The willingness of the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings to grant lengthy delays means many companies have avoided paying large fines for polluting for years, if they pay them at all.”
For its report, Reinvent Albany analyzed the hearings scheduled from June 29 to July 29 of this year, and found 19 percent — 2,563 of 13,837 — had been rescheduled from an earlier date.
OATH, the city agency that administers city-issued fines, finds alleged idling violators guilty 90 percent of the time. But some companies have managed to avoid those judgement through endless delays: Go New York Tours, which operates the TopView-brand sightseeing buses, has 1,429 idling violations in rescheduling limbo worked nearly $1 million.
Reinvent Albany identified nine other companies with 150 or more hearings labeled “rescheduled” in the city’s public idling violation database. One company, shuttle bus provider Corporate Express, has 60 percent of its hearings labeled “rescheduled” — and paid just two of the 84 violations for which OATH officials found it guilty.
Another company, healthcare transportation provider D-J Ambulette, has delayed 346 of its 411 hearings through rescheduling. In 2024, the company sought an exemption from the anti-idling law, which the Department of Environmental Protection says it still pending.
The Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings allows three ways for companies to postpone hearings, according to Reinvent Albany — none of which require a reason. Companies can reschedule once before a hearing, request an adjournment at the hearing itself or simply not show up to the hearing at all. No-shows allow companies to delay their hearings for up to a year or even longer, so long as they have an excuse.
OATH “appears to routinely accept any excuse” for a missed hearing, according to Reinvent Albany — which explain why D-J Ambulette has open 60 violations from 2022 or earlier.
City law dating back to the first Earth Day prohibits drivers from running their engines for more than three minutes. The Citizens Air Complaint Program program allows everyday New Yorkers to report illegal idling and receive a portion of the fine if OATH successfully prosecutes their complaint.
The typical wait time between a reported violation and its trial date is 15 months, at a minimum. Even then, idling complaints have surged since the City Council required DEP to stand up the program back in 2018 — to the chagrin of corporate polluters. The bus industry, which accounts for half of the top 10 companies with the most reschedule hearings, has sued the city in federal court to kill the program.
Several of the companies with the most rescheduled hearings have also applied for and received official exemptions to the idling law from DEP — most notably Academy, a bus and school bus provider, which received the city’s largest ever idling law exemption in December from outgoing Mayor Eric Adams’s administration.
The exemption did not apply to Academy’s past violations, however. And OATH, which operates under the mayor’s jurisdiction, is not powerless to close the loophole, Reinvent Albany said.
The group called on the agency to require companies give a reason for rescheduling “under penalty of perjury” and allow no more than 90 days between initial and rescheduled hearing. The City Council should also amend the law to prohibit companies from rescheduling hearing is they have more than 10 percent of their violations in rescheduling limbo or more than 25 percent of their violations unpaid.
A spokesperson for OATH defended its approach to the delayed idling tickets as in line with the same rules and procedures it applies to all alleged violators of city laws, and denied allowing defendants to delay hearings indefinitely.
“OATH’s rules of procedure govern the OATH hearing process, including, but not limited to when and how reschedules, adjournments and new hearings after a default can be requested and/or granted. As the report notes, there are several circumstances when any and all respondents have the right to request and receive a reschedule of their hearing date under OATH’s rules,” the rep, Marisa Sengio, said in a statement.
“OATH receives approximately one million summonses a year from two dozen City enforcement agencies, and it is important to note that OATH’s rules apply equally to every respondent who appears at OATH. No case type or respondent receives special treatment. If someone is not entitled to a reschedule under our procedural rules, the request for a reschedule or new hearing date will not be granted,” Sengio said. “OATH believes strongly in the fair and equitable application of its rules, and the law and processes its cases in accordance with this ethos.”
Of course, even companies found guilty of illegal idling don’t always pay — the Mamdani administration recently collected nearly $10 million in unpaid idling fines from Amazon, in response to reporting by Streetsblog. Go New York Tours, the number 1 culprit of Reinvent Albany’s alleged delay scheme, owes more than $2.1 million in unpaid idling fines — having paid just 9.8 percent of what the city says it owes.
Reps for Go New York Tours did not return a request for comment.
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