What Garbage! No Pickups Till Monday

It’s not just the snow cleanup that’s rotten in the city: A week’s worth of last year’s garbage is stinking things up for the start of 2011.

The good news is that citywide trash pickup, absent since Sunday’s 20-inch blizzard, will resume Monday in areas scheduled for collection that day.

The bad news: Only if your street is clear.

“We have to get back to a normal schedule,” said Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty.

It can’t come soon enough for outer borough residents still struggling with ice-covered streets, snowed-in cars and pent-up anger.

“This is unacceptable,” said Alan Baum, whose mother, Daisy, remained stranded on a Jamaica street coated with several inches of snow and growing mounds of garbage. “This is not the first time New York City had a snowstorm. You could say this is Bloomberg’s Katrina.”

Lisa Rabito, 49, said her block of 76th St. was “an atrocious mess,” with 4 inches of packed snow still on the street.

At one point, her neighbors took to the streets with snowblowers in an effort to do what the city had not in the five days since the blizzard began Sunday.

The announcement that garbage will be collected only on streets cleared of snow was bad news for those Brooklyn residents struggling yesterday with still-blocked roadways.

In East New York, cars kept getting stuck in the ice and snow of unplowed Blake Ave. An irate Deborah Maxwell spent 45 minutes with her trapped 2000 BMW before neighbors freed her car.

“Do they care about the citizens or do they care about themselves?” asked Maxwell, 40, an unemployed finance worker. “Five days later and I’m still getting stuck? What’s the problem?”

Vinny Singh, 24, helped free a city Access-A-Ride vehicle trapped for 90 minutes yesterday on Blake Ave. The unplowed streets kept the electrician from moving his car, and cost him a week’s worth of work.

“Somebody should throw a snowball at Bloomberg,” he said. “Let him wait for a bus for five hours and see how it feels. …This can’t happen again. I can’t afford it.”

Sanitation workers hope to begin garbage collection this weekend by emptying containers at some large apartment buildings, a department spokesman said.

They will also begin emptying litter baskets across the city this weekend. More details on next week’s plans are expected tomorrow.

The commissioner, in an end-of-year note to his troops, thanked them for “your dedication and endless hours of work during the recent blizzard.”

Cleanup costs for the blizzard, the first storm of the season, were expected to climb above $20.5 million – more than half the city’s snow removal budget of $38.5 million for the season.

Mayor Bloomberg, on his weekly radio show, announced cars stuck in metered spots needed to relocate by Monday – although alternate side of the street parking will remain suspended.

“This year is not ending the way I would have preferred, but it’s still been a good year,” Bloomberg said.

He has asked the Department of Investigations to look into claims that some disgruntled sanitmen deliberately didn’t plow side streets. “I don’t know if it took place,” he said, “but if it did, it’s a disgrace.”