NYC NOW - July 19, 2023: Evening Roudup

Episode Date: July 19, 2023

More and more New York and New Jersey residents are buying electric vehicles, but it’s not always easy to find a place to charge up if you don’t have a garage or driveway. WNYC’s David Brand reports on some of the hacks EV car owners are inventing to get a charge. Also, residents of one Brooklyn block have spent years trying to catch a serial litterer. WNYC’s Bahar Ostadan tries to look into who was behind the littering and the consequences they may or may not have faced.

Good evening and welcome to NYC now. I'm Michael Hill for WNYC. More and more New York and New Jersey residents are buying electric vehicles, but it's not always easy to find a place to charge up if you don't have a garage or a driveway. So some renters are getting really creative, but as WNIC's David Brand reports, it does come with some risks. It's street cleaning day in the Heights section of Jersey City, and Sal Kameli is sitting in his cherry-red Tesla. He's getting ready to swoop in right after the street sweeper passes

and claim a primo parking spot right outside his apartment. The street cleaner's coming down. So we're going to be doing the street cleaner. Camelli's what you call an electric vehicle aficionado. He owns three of them, the Tesla, and a couple of decade-old Nissan Leafs. And he's got an elaborate system for moving them around to save spots for himself and his neighbors. After he parks, he runs a custom-made cord 34 feet from his first floor apartment window over the sidewalk, down a street sign, and into the cars.

To charge out my window costs me $12. It's very cheap. Kamelli's charging hack points to a bigger issue. The lack of places to juice up. Loose wires can cause accidents, and cheap extension cords can be dangerous, but there's no law against at-home EV charging. The New Jersey Department of Transportation and Planning declined to comment for this story. Jersey City has 49 chargers at 27 stations.

with plans to add dozens more. On the other side of the Hudson, New York City has hundreds of charging stations and is adding 50 more high-speed units. But plenty of EV owners are also plugging into their apartments. Con Edison spokesperson Jamie McShane says the do-it-yourself approach shows New Yorkers are innovative. Where there's a will, there's a way.

Our goal at Con Edison is to bring New Yorkers EV charging in a more convenient and efficient manner. The city's Department of Transportation says New Yorkers should not charge from their apartments. So for now, it's kind of the Wild West out there, forcing landlords to play the role of sheriff. Manhattan property manager Aaron Weber says it's too risky to let tenants run cords out of their apartments. He worries. What if someone trips and sues the owner?

Yep, they would have to cease and desist right away. Back in Jersey City, Sal Kameli's neighbor, Emad Yusuf, has a different view. He owns a two-unit home down the street and says he doesn't see any problem with at-home charging, as long as the tenant's paying up. The guy, he paid the electric ban. He charged the car from an apartment. Not everyone likes it, though. Kamelli posts his EV endeavors on YouTube.

One clip of his parking choreography has over a million views and plenty of angry comments. These guys are using two old cars as placeholders to preserve four personal parking spots on public streets. It's really a d-a-move against your own neighbors. But he doesn't care. His Tesla app tells him he drove 13. 15,000 miles and saved 1,200 bucks on gas last year. He has no intention of changing his charging habits. I want to park my cars in front of my building, and I'm going to do it, and that's it. David Brand, WNYC News.

Stick around. There's more after the break. This next story is a trashy mystery, literally trashy. Residents of one Brooklyn block have spent years trying to catch a serial litterer. WNMIC's Baha Ostadon has more on who was behind it and the consequences they face. Noble Street in Greenpoint looks like your typical residential street. It's lined with trees, three-story row houses. But for years, starting in 2019, residents woke up to hundreds of pieces of paper scattered along their street. A serial litterer was leaving behind a literal paper trail. The first time, it just seemed like, oh, something.

Something weird happened, you know, like a bunch of papers got blown around. But then like the second time, it was like, wait a second. That's Molly Fitzsimons. She's lived on Noble Street for 15 years. She and her neighbors, like Dylan Krause and Yushee Lou, have been perplexed by the whole thing. How many pages if you had to estimate, you think? I mean, each time, hundreds, maybe a thousand? It's like entire book.

We're talking about like hundreds of pages. The pages were precisely cut out of TV guys. Bibles, Edgar Allan Poe novels, even 70s porn mags. And sometimes things would be underlined or highlighted on the pages and we try to figure out if there was some message. My husband would come in and say, you know, the book bandit was here again.

Residents called 311-9-1-1 and the sanitation department, but still no leads. A break in the case came in January when a homeowner adjusted her security camera to get a better view of the street. video captured a dark car driving slowly down the block at 5.30 in the morning. Fistfuls of paper were flying out of the driver's side window. But the videos didn't clearly show the suspect.

So another neighbor arranged multiple overnight stakeouts with the help of a private security firm. That's how they got the car's license plate. Again, Molly Fitzsimmons. It was very much just this shadowy mystery. But I did have a sense that it might be somebody who had a graduate. against Noble Street. That's WNYC's Bahar Ostadon, who's walking us through a rather strange mystery that's consumed this one block in Greenpoint for years, and she joins us now. Bahar, hi. Hi, Michael.

So what was behind this serial littering and what happened to that person? So it turns out it was an NYPD sergeant named John Trisinski. He actually lives in Long Island, but he grew up on Noble Street as a kid. The NYPD docked him just one vacancy. Day. And actually, he was never issued a summons or a fine by the sanitation department. Do we have any idea why he did this? We definitely tried to find out. The NYPD essentially gave us no information about the investigation. Their press office directed us to a public records database, and that showed, you know, he was docked one vacation day for littering. We called the sergeants union, which represents Trisinski. They wouldn't comment. We called the precinct commander in Green

point, we even called Trisinski's wife and sisters, and we spoke to people who live on the block. But Trisinski's status as a cop made neighbors nervous to speak on the record or speak to us at all. I did get Trisinski himself on the phone, but he hung up. Well, Hart, this raises questions about accountability here. The punishment seems pretty light. Why is that? I learned that it's actually pretty hard for the city to cite someone for littering if they're not caught in the act. There is also a law against what's called illegal dumping, and the fines for that run anywhere from $4,000 to $18,000. But you have to dump a minimum of one cubic yard of material from your car at a given time, and Trasinski's paper trail didn't come close to that. At the same time, it's important to note what police could do.

For instance, Buffalo News covered this guy last year who kept leaving hundreds of empty McDonald's coffee cups on his former co-worker's lawn. He was charged with harassment, littering, fined a couple thousand dollars, got 20 hours of community service, and was hit with a restraining order. For Trisinski, he was assigned to an NYPD auto pound. That's a common assignment for cops who might be a liability or they're not in good standing with the department. And actually, last year, he earned over $177,000. What a story here. I'm sure you'd love to hear what he has to say about this. That's Bahar Oostodon, accountability reporter for WNIC.

Bahar, thank you. Thanks, Michael. Thanks for listening to NYC now from WNYC. I'm Michael Hill. Catch us every weekday, three times a day. We'll be back tomorrow.