The Nanny State legacy of Rudy Giuliani reveals itself in all it’s pathetic glory:
A 6-year-old Brooklyn girl’s family was threatened with a $300 fine after a neighbor complained to the city about the girl’s blue chalk drawings.
The absurd warning from the city Sanitation Department arrived Oct. 5, a few days after Natalie Shea scribbled a blue flower on her parents’ 10th St. stoop in Park Slope.
The Sanitation Department claimed that Natalie’s drawings amounted to “graffiti.”
When Natalie’s mom, Jen Pepperman, read the letter, she said her reaction was, “What graffiti?”
The letter was automatically churned out after a neighbor complained to the city’s 311 line. The city told the family it had 45 days to remove the doodles or face the hefty fine.
Natalie, a first-grader, doesn’t understand all of the fuss.
“My mom got a ticket for graffiti, and it wasn’t even graffiti,” she said. “I think it was chalk. It was art, very nice art.”
Sanitation Department spokeswoman Kathy Dawkins said while the department “does not consider a child’s chalk drawing to be graffiti,” the form letter is mailed after all complaints about graffiti to 311.
“If people call and complain, we have to follow it up; we have to respond,” she said.
I’m not sure who the bigger idiot is here; the neighbor who complained about a little girl playing outside, or the government official who mailed out the form letter without even bothering to investigate the complaint. In either case, it’s idiotic stuff like this that is Rudy Giuliani’s legacy as Mayor of New York.
October 17th, 2007 at 2:37 pm
Did you bother to read (let alone cite) the rest of the article?
Allow me to enlighten you: “Councilman Peter Vallone Jr., who introduced the 2005 city law requiring property owners to clean graffiti . . .”
See the date? 2005, as in three years after Giuliani left office as Mayor of New York.
Meanwhile, the sponsor, Peter Vallone, was Giuliani’s chief political rival during the 1990s (Vallone was City Council Speaker back then).
Now, I have my own problems with Giuliani, but attaching a law written by his most prominent local oppenent and passed three years after his tenure as Mayor ended to his “legacy” is just bizarre.
October 17th, 2007 at 2:52 pm
Perhaps, but the law itself is of the same ilk as the one’s Giuliani highlights when he talks about his time as Mayor of New York.