Mayor Bloomberg shrugged off a report of a Brooklyn man mistakenly slapped with $48,000 in fines for posting illegal signs he had nothing to do with.
“No harm done,” said the mayor when asked about the report in yesterday’s Post. “I’m sorry it happened to him. It’s hardly a great tragedy.”
The Sanitation Department mistakenly sent 643 bogus tickets to 72-year-old Levy Zelishovsky for advertising a moving company on Brooklyn lampposts even though Zelishovsky had no ties to the company.
The city will void the tickets.
But the mayor called it an “outrage” when fellow politicians run up hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines for illegally attaching campaign posters to public property and then get off on technicalities.
“We have a law that makes sense so that you don’t have all these posters all over the place,” the mayor said.
The mayor didn’t mention anyone by name.
But Comptroller John Liu has succeeded in overturning more illegal-postering summonses than anyone — 7,269 tickets worth $545,175 issued during the 2009 campaign.
“Every citizen has a right to make sure the Department of Sanitation complies with the law,” said Liu’s lawyer, Marty Connor, who successfully argued Liu’s summonses weren’t properly served.
Two other candidates in 2009 races — former Comptroller Bill Thompson and Public Advocate Bill de Blasio — together owe nearly $1 million in poster penalties. Both are in the process of appeals.