Some street snitches are raking in close to $1 million apiece from the city just by recording videos of idling trucks and buses spewing air pollution, prompting local pols to try to curb the staggering payouts.
“The days of the six-figure bounty hunters are over,” Queens City Councilman James Gennaro, who chairs the Environmental Committee, told The Post.
“We’re not doing that anymore,” he said. “The program has become an occupation. The program was not intended to be an occupation.”
The Big Apple’s Citizen Idling Complaint Program was launched in 2019, with the city even recruiting ’80s punk rocker Billy Idol to promote the effort the next year.
“Billy never idles. Neither should you. Idling is polluting. Cut your engine off,” the rock star urged in an ad campaign.
Under the program, citizen enforcers are awarded 25% of the fines pursued by the Department of Environmental and substantiated by the New York City Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings, or OATH.
If the tattletales go to OATH directly, they can receive 50 percent of any substantiated offense.
With fines ranging from $350 to $2,000 for idling and 95% of the complaints substantiated, the rewards add up and have turned the streets into gold for the Big Apple’s citizen enforcers.
According to DEP records obtained by The Post, here are the top-earning enviro-enforcers who have earned an “assumed” total amount of more than $500,000 and approaching $1 million:
- Ernest Welde of the East Village, Manhattan: $895,737
- Wanfang Wu of the Lower East Side, Manhattan: $748,825
- Ephraim Rosenbaum of the Lower East Side: $725, 025
- Michael Streeter of Brooklyn Heights: $709, 975
- Patrick Schnell of Boerum Hill, Brooklyn: $582,800
The program involves simply taking phone videos of trucks idling for more than 3 minutes or school buses for more than 1 minute and submitting the footage as evidence to the DEP and OATH.
More New Yorkers appear to be catching on to the easy money, with the number of bounty-hunter submissions fielded by the DEP skyrocketing in recent years — increasing from 49,000 in 2022 to 124,000 in 2024. More than 100,000 have been filed this year.
But DEP officials said the anti-idling whistleblowers are focusing their attention on the city’s business core such as Midtown and lower Manhattan, wealthier Brooklyn neighborhoods and western Queens — not exactly the “environmental justice” communities” such as Harlem, the South Bronx, Brooklyn’s East New York and Brownsville and Staten Island’s North Shore.
Department of Environmental Commissioner Rohit Aggarwala last year told the council, “While we can and should pay people who do the service of reporting offenses, we do not need to make them millionaires.”
One of the citizen enforcers, Schnell, insisted that he hasn’t collected the $582,000 in rewards that the DEP suggests he has.
“Where did you get that number from?” a shocked Schnell told a Post reporter from behind a cracked door in front of the entrance of his Brooklyn home Sunday.
“That is not the money I have received,” he said.
Before closing the door, Schnell added, “It’s hard work.”
A rep for an anti-idling activist group responded on behalf of other top complaint filers contacted by The Post.
“Air pollution is deadly—it causes cancer, dementia, asthma, and 3,200 premature deaths in New York each year—so it’s no surprise that the truck and bus industries and their allies want to change the subject,” George Pakenham of the New York Clean Air Collective said in a statement.
“The Department of Environmental Protection should let more people report illegal air pollution by fixing its ancient website, ending its discrimination against non-English-speaking New Yorkers, and hiring more workers to hold polluters accountable.”
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