NEW YORK (WCBS 880) – Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams has called a town hall this week to address the widespread problem of placard abuse by city officials.
Earlier this year, Mayor de Blasio announced a three-strikes-your-out system on placard abuse and said the city was moving away from the physical placards to stickers by 2021.
Since 2017, the city has received more than 7,000 complains of government employees using their city issued parking placards to park where they shouldn’t.
"If they're using it for their personal reasons, or if we have an oversaturation of placards in a particular community, there needs to be other ways in how we can utilize vehicles,” Adams said.
Adams has invited the NYPD and Department of Transportation to Tuesday’s town hall.
The borough president has gotten push back recently on Twitter over what critics say is inaction. One user called him “too scared to say that it's wrong for the police to park in a TURNING LANE.”
Adams replied to that comment, saying in part, “Your hidden face is in the tradition of others who hid themselves with white hoods.”
Adams told WCBS 880’s Mack Rosenberg that the comment was not a reference to the Ku Klux Klan, as the Twitter user had claimed.
“I was saying to him and to everyone who use Twitter as a bullying tool or to hide their faces, that those are cowardly actions,” Adams said.