Dog poop is blanketing New York City sidewalks, and the Department of Sanitation knows it. The problem, the agency’s acting commissioner told the City Council this week, is that there is almost nothing they can do about it.
Javier Lojan, the acting sanitation commissioner, told council members during a budget hearing Monday that enforcement of the city’s pooper scooper law is nearly impossible to carry out in practice. The department receives a steady stream of 311 complaints, particularly after this winter’s punishing snowstorms revealed months of accumulated waste as temperatures rose. But translating those complaints into actual summonses requires something enforcement officers almost never manage to witness firsthand.
“Our enforcement officer would have to catch the owner in the act of leaving a pile behind,” Lojan said.
The numbers tell the story. DSNY conducted stakeout operations in Mott Haven in the Bronx in 2024, deploying officers over three days in a neighborhood with a high volume of poop-related complaints. They issued a single summons. Last year, officers ran weeklong patrols across Washington Heights, Harlem, Morningside Heights, and Flatbush. Summonses issued during that entire blitz: zero.
“The chances of someone not picking up after their dog while an enforcement officer is watching is very, very slim,” Lojan said. “So slim, that we issued just two summonses for failure to remove canine waste in 2025.”
The maximum fine for violating the law is $250, assuming anyone is actually caught. In practice, the city has largely relied on dirty sidewalk summonses issued to property owners. DSNY issued 8,999 such summonses so far this year, which can include dog waste as part of the broader category. But that approach holds building owners responsible rather than the dog owners creating the mess.
The city has run ads and educational outreach campaigns reminding dog owners of their legal obligations, though Lojan acknowledged that awareness is not the real problem. “Every dog owner knows what they are supposed to do,” he said. “In consideration of their neighbors, they should do the right thing and pick up after their dogs.”
Not every elected official has been as diplomatic. Brooklyn Councilmember Chi Ossé posted on Instagram in blunter terms after January’s storms buried the city’s streets, writing: “PICK UP YOUR F---ING DOG SHIT.” His Brooklyn colleague Shahana Hanif posted a video of her own, walking viewers through the proper process for cleaning up after a dog and disposing of the waste.
The frustration is understandable. January’s historic snowfall, described as a once-in-a-decade event, left waste piled and frozen across the city for weeks before the melt arrived and reminded New Yorkers exactly what their neighbors had been leaving behind.
New York’s pooper scooper law dates to 1978 and was passed in significant part due to the sustained advocacy of Fran Lee, a New Yorker who made the public health case for clearing dog waste from city streets. Nearly fifty years later, the law is on the books but largely unenforceable by the agency tasked with upholding it.
The snowstorm also punched a significant hole in the city’s budget. DSNY uses a formula established by the City Charter to calculate its snow removal allocation, averaging actual spending over the previous five years. That figure has run between $80 million and $100 million annually in recent years. This winter forced the agency to request an additional $100 million during the January budget re-adjustment, a significant unplanned expense for a city already navigating tight finances.
The City Council is currently working through budget hearings following Mayor Adams’s preliminary budget release, and Monday’s session made clear that the sanitation department is facing scrutiny on multiple fronts. Snow costs, enforcement gaps, and the more elemental question of whose job it is to keep city sidewalks clean all surfaced during the hearing.
The agency’s honest answer on dog waste enforcement may not satisfy residents who step around piles on their morning commute. But Lojan’s candor at least makes the stakes clear. Without either a technological solution or a dramatic expansion of enforcement staffing, the pooper scooper law will continue to depend almost entirely on the conscience of dog owners willing to follow it.
