{"id":26366,"date":"2025-11-03T02:03:06","date_gmt":"2025-11-03T02:03:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/26366\/"},"modified":"2025-11-03T02:03:06","modified_gmt":"2025-11-03T02:03:06","slug":"nyc-bounty-hunters-score-nearly-million-dollar-payouts-reporting-traffic-idling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/26366\/","title":{"rendered":"NYC ‘bounty hunters’ score nearly million-dollar payouts reporting traffic ‘idling’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some street snitches are raking in close to $1 million<\/a> apiece from the city just by recording videos of idling trucks and buses spewing air pollution, prompting local pols to try to curb the staggering payouts.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe days of the six-figure bounty hunters are over,\u201d Queens City Councilman James Gennaro, who chairs the Environmental Committee, told The Post.<\/p>\n

\u201cBounty hunters\u201d are raking in close to $1 million apiece from the city just by recording videos of idling trucks and buses spewing air pollution. Tricky Shark \u2013 stock.adobe.com<\/p>\n

NYC Mayor Eric Adams smiles as Councilmember James F. Gennaro speaks at a press conference. Stephen Yang<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not doing that anymore,\u201d he said. \u201cThe program has become an occupation<\/a>. The program was not intended to be an occupation.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Big Apple\u2019s Citizen Idling Complaint Program was launched in 2019, with the city even recruiting \u201980s punk rocker Billy Idol to promote the effort the next year. <\/p>\n

\u201cBilly never idles. Neither should you. Idling is polluting. Cut your engine off,\u201d the rock star urged<\/a> in an ad campaign.<\/p>\n

Under the program, citizen enforcers are awarded 25% of the fines pursued by the Department of Environmental and substantiated by the New York City Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings, or OATH.<\/p>\n

Michael Streeter of Brooklyn Heights earned over $700K while catching idling vehicles. CBS<\/p>\n

If the tattletales go to OATH directly, they can receive 50 percent of any substantiated offense.<\/p>\n

With fines ranging from $350 to $2,000 for idling and 95% of the complaints substantiated, the rewards add up and have turned the streets into gold for the Big Apple\u2019s citizen enforcers.<\/p>\n

According to DEP records obtained by The Post, here are the top-earning enviro-enforcers who have earned an \u201cassumed\u201d total amount of more than $500,000 and approaching $1 million:<\/p>\n

Ernest Welde of the East Village, Manhattan: $895,737<\/p>\n

Wanfang Wu of the Lower East Side, Manhattan: $748,825<\/p>\n

Ephraim Rosenbaum of the Lower East Side: $725, 025<\/p>\n

Michael Streeter of Brooklyn Heights: $709, 975<\/p>\n

Patrick Schnell of Boerum Hill, Brooklyn: $582,800<\/p>\n

The program involves simply taking phone videos of trucks idling for more than 3 minutes or school buses for more than 1 minute and submitting the footage as evidence<\/a> to the DEP and OATH.<\/p>\n

More New Yorkers appear to be catching on to the easy money, with the number of bounty-hunter submissions fielded by the DEP skyrocketing in recent years \u2014 increasing from 49,000 in 2022 to 124,000 in 2024. More than 100,000 have been filed this year.<\/p>\n

But DEP officials said the anti-idling whistleblowers<\/a> are focusing their attention on the city\u2019s business core such as Midtown and lower Manhattan, wealthier Brooklyn neighborhoods and western Queens \u2014 not exactly the \u201cenvironmental justice\u201d communities\u201d such as Harlem, the South Bronx, Brooklyn\u2019s East New York and Brownsville and Staten Island\u2019s North Shore.<\/p>\n

The program involves simply taking phone videos of trucks idling for more than 3 minutes or school buses for more than 1 minute and submitting the footage as evidence. Getty Images<\/p>\n

Department of Environmental Commissioner Rohit Aggarwala last year told the council, \u201cWhile we can and should pay people who do the service of reporting offenses, we do not need to make them millionaires.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the citizen enforcers, Schnell, insisted that he hasn\u2019t collected the $582,000 in rewards that the DEP suggests he has.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhere did you get that number from?\u201d a shocked Schnell told a Post reporter from behind a cracked door in front of the entrance of his Brooklyn home Sunday.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat is not the money I have received,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Before closing the door, Schnell added, \u2029\u201cIt\u2019s hard work.\u201d<\/p>\n

A rep for an anti-idling activist group responded on behalf of other top complaint filers contacted by The Post.<\/p>\n

\u201cAir pollution is deadly\u2014it causes cancer, dementia, asthma, and 3,200 premature deaths in New York each year\u2014so it\u2019s no surprise that the truck and bus industries and their allies want to change the subject,\u201d George Pakenham of the New York Clean Air Collective said in a statement.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Department of Environmental Protection should let more people report illegal air pollution by fixing its ancient website, ending its discrimination against non-English-speaking New Yorkers, and hiring more workers to hold polluters accountable.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Some street snitches are raking in close to $1 million apiece from the city just by recording videos…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":26367,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[1209,4663,7003,57,9,56,63,65,64,13926,16732,16733,58,16734],"class_list":["post-26366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-buses","tag-department-of-environmental-protection","tag-fines","tag-metro","tag-new-york","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-nyc-headlines","tag-nyc-news","tag-pollution","tag-summons","tag-trucks","tag-us-news","tag-whistleblowers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26366"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26366\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}