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Citizen complaint of the day: One helluva slob in the South End

Garbage pile

A concerned citizen complains about this impromptu landfill on Mass. Ave. north of Washington:

This garbage has been piled up for 2 days. I know the City is working hard on garbage pickup in the South End, but I wanted to report this pile which is exceptionally bad. It isn't from ripped bags or the wrong bags- I don't think there ever were bags.

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Comments

there's an addressed envelope somewhere in there.

City should find it and fine the jackass the maximum.

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Officer, I can not tell a lie, I put that envelope at the bottom of that pile.

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The group W bench is not a place you want to be.

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The whole country spent eight years on it, and we're still feeling aftereffects.

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This mess should be cleaned up with shovels, and rakes and implements of destruction.

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We had a former neighbor dump a bunch of furniture and trash and electronics and stuff, including notebooks full of school papers with their kids' first and last names on them, all over the sidewalk blocking our car into our driveway. We called the city and ISD came out and fined ME for having trash out incorrectly. They insisted they handle code violations only, and our property was violating the code. They said they don't investigate who did something.

So I called the cops, and they said that code violations are an ISD matter. I told them that it appears to me that there are also several laws that could cover this (dumping, vandalism, blocking someone's access to their private property...) but they kept insisting it was an ISD matter and ISD had acted correctly.

So, yeah, as with most anything else, you can pretty much do whatever you want in this city and no one will stop you.

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Did you have to pay? Did you talk to your neighbor? Did you have them pay you to pay the fine?

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The people who dumped all the stuff did it when they were moving. I knew their first and last names but not really much else, and the cops wouldn't get involved, so no way for me to track them down. They were renters. I mentioned it to their landlord, who didn't wish to be helpful in the matter.

HOWEVER, I still don't know what happened with the fine. One thing I discovered when I talked to ISD to try and let them know what I knew who did it was that they actually ticketed our three-family condo association. The ticket was written out just to the building address with no unit number.

ISD guy didn't seem to get that that's totally ineffective, telling me that if I didn't pay the ticket, it would become a lien on our property taxes. Whose property taxes, I asked? The condo association's, they replied. Condo associations aren't assessed property taxes, I told them. ISD guy kept insisting that they are, and that they'd send the ticket to tax/title if we didn't pay it. I was like, fine, go ahead, then. Never heard anything more about it.

I wonder if ISD has written a whole slew of tickets to building addresses with no unit and never gotten payment for them?!

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A coworker who lived in North Cambridge was summonsed because there is a certain department who writes tickets for "illegal dumping" and threatened with a $5,000 fine for dumping in a neighborhood she had not been in for a long time. They said they found her address, but refused (illegally, I might add) to tell her exactly what they found and treated her like shit over the phone - considering she was accused and not convicted of anything.

The ticketing officer never showed to the hearing, but it was some serious harassment considering that her landlord in Cambridge had reported people stealing her building's recycling mini-dumpsters just prior. "That doesn't matter because this is Boston, not Cambridge". Because, you know, stolen recycle bins are never transported ...

Fascist idiots - turns out that this particular unit is compensated for the NUMBER of tickets it writes, but not the VALIDITY of those tickets. Meanwhile, garbage piles like the one pictured? Or the "weekly" ones in some areas? nothing.

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Interesting - either ISD has changed their policy over the years, or they apply different interpretations of that policy by whim (entirely possible.) Some years ago the house next to ours was rented by a group of frat boys, one of whom thought it was the funniest prank in the world to steal a bag of trash from one house and dump it in the front yard of another house in the neighborhood. We got at least one ticket from ISD because one of our bags had been dumped, and we were identified by junk mail in the trash.

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no policy. Just the fortitude, or lack there of of the ISD person responding to the call.

Once it get's to the point that the bureaucracy handles it (the ticket has been written), "Hey, were just doing our job".

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Doesn't every city deserve at least one Kafkaesque department? A place where reason fails, logic is aborted, both rare and common sense are jettisoned in favor of staff that bludgeons citizens - guilty or innocent, without regard for degree, responsibility or fairness?

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Not only here, but further west on Massachusetts Avenue near the intersection with Tremont St on the same side.

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It wasn't in a bag, but it was in a steamer trunk. Someone dumped the trunk and took it. So it's a combo of jerks responsible for this.

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had someone leave a trash bag in front of my building on a Saturday, so would have been there until Tuesday morning. Having gotten fed up with this, I actually opened the bag and saw a student picture ID. As I'm holding it, a car pulls up, driver gets out, and guess what, it's the guy! I called him by name on ID and asked, "why did you put your trash out in front of my building on a non-trash day?" He tried to plead ignorance, but then realized I had him dead to rights. I asked him how he would feel looking out his front window at someone's trash for three days, and possibly having to pay a ticket if the building got cited? He took back the bag. Saw him on the Silver Line a couple of weeks later, he tried to ignore me, I gave him a big friendly hello, still remembering his name!

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I noticed this a lot when I used to work at BMC. There were some of the highest rents in the city around there and there would just be garbage strewn in the sidewalk. Made no sense to me!

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Update... I saw ISD truck at this mess around 11am today.... Guy in uniform got out put on rubber gloves and dug in to bags, had some type of camera with him taking pictures. About an hour later DPW showed up and cleaned up mess...

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Always amazed me at how poorly people disposed of trash in some of Boston's best neighborhoods. You find this only in the worst neighborhoods of NYC.

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