Locals near a needle-exchange site in a Bronx park are cheering a councilman’s proposal to require city health workers to collect hundreds of discarded syringes littering the ground.
Oswald Feliz, a Democrat representing the 15th District, recently put forward a new bill demanding the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene create a plan to pick up the litany of needles strewn around the city-funded, mobile, syringe distribution centers.
Marie, a 35-year-old mother of three who lives near Richman Echo Park in Tremont’s Mount Hope neighborhood — where one of the centers is located — said she wholeheartedly supports the bill.
“My children and other children in the neighborhood play in the park,” she told The Post. “Keep them safe. Pick up your garbage. If you’re going to give them the needles, you should be responsible for cleaning up after them.
“Do you think when [the drug addicts] are out of their minds, they are going to drop the needles in some box?” she asked. “Wherever they use it, they are going to drop it right there. I see the needles in the park all the time.”
Other residents echoed her comments, with several saying they won’t let their kids play in the park because they don’t know what mess the children might encounter.
A local dad who declined to give his name told The Post he often sees a custodian at a nearby school sweeping up the debris every day at 5 a.m.
“They should be the ones coming here at 5 in the morning and cleaning up, not him,” the man said of city DOH workers. “You give them needles, you create the mess, you clean it up.
“I don’t like that they are giving them needles in a park where children play — and with a school only blocks away,” he said. “I am a parent. I would not want my child or any child to step on a needle, it’s dangerous.
Stephen Yang
“You don’t know what disease these people have.”
Feliz said, “Communities should not have to cope with discarded used needles in our parks, libraries and even school playgrounds – creating unwelcoming and unsafe environments for entire communities.”
If his proposal is signed into law, it would direct the department to report the number of needles handed out and the number collected.
Last year, outreach and syringe litter teams reported picking up 187,238 needles and provided “syringe disposal education” more than 6,800 times.
