The Council Member

When Antonio was elected to the Council, three neighborhoods handled three-quarters of the city’s trash. North Brooklyn alone processed about 40% of the city’s trash, and southeast Queens and the South Bronx together handled another 35%. Every day, garbage trucks barreled through these neighborhoods, pumping toxic pollution into the air and driving up rates of asthma-related illnesses.

In 2018, then-Council Member Reynoso introduced the Waste Equity Law to ensure the burden of trash processing was shared fairly across the city’s neighborhoods. The bill sought to cut the daily capacity of waste transfer stations in the three overburdened neighborhoods and mandate that no community district in the city process more than 10% of the city’s trash. The bill passed and a year after it was implemented, the Department of Sanitation announced that waste processing capacity in these three areas was reduced by more than 10,000 tons.

Read more about the Waste Equity Act: Waste Equity Law cuts 10,000 tons of trash capacity in overburdened nabes: report.

Unchecked and unregulated, the private trash collection industry was wreaking havoc on New York City while Antonio was serving on the City Council. The industry – made up of about 90 private carting companies responsible for picking up more than 3 million tons of commercial waste every year – had long been defined by exploitative work conditions, dangerous driving records, and millions of unnecessary truck miles. After the particularly bad actor Sanitation Salvage hit and killed two New Yorkers – one their own employee and the other a 72-year-old pedestrian – Antonio penned his Commercial Waste Zone (CWZ) legislation to overhaul and reform the private waste industry.

In 2019, Antonio’s CWZ bill was signed into law, requiring the city to be divided up into 20 zones, with each to be serviced by a maximum of three carters. Instead of a single neighborhood being serviced by as many as 50 different carters (as was the case at the time), truck routes would be safer, healthier, and more efficient.

This year, after five years of delay, New York City finally launched its first CWZ in Queens. Once the program is fully up and running, millions of truck miles will be cut from our streets every year, the air will be cleaner, workers will be protected, and our city will be safer.

Read more about the Commercial Waste Zones bill: City Council passes historic waste zone bill

As a young man in Brooklyn, Antonio was stopped and searched a police officer without cause, an experience that made him feel unsafe in his own neighborhood when he had done nothing wrong. As a Council Member, he championed the Right to Know Act to prevent illegal searches like he had experienced and improve trust and transparency between NYPD officers and members of the public.

The Right to Know Act is formed in two parts. The first part, penned by then-Council Member Reynoso, is called the Consent to Search law. It requires officers to inform you of your right to refuse a search if they do not have legal justification to search you. The officers must explain that they cannot proceed with searching you unless they receive your “voluntary, knowing, and intelligent” consent. The second part, penned by then-Council Member Ritchie Torres, is called the NYPD ID Law. It requires that officers proactively provide business cards with their name, rank, badge number, and command in certain situations, including if they search you.

Read more about the Right to Know Act: Right to Know Is Now the Law. Here’s What That Means.

It’s a rare thing when a community initiates a rezoning, but this was the case in 2013, when Brooklyn Community Board 4 reached out to then-Council Member Antonio Reynoso and his fellow Bushwick representative Council Member Rafael Espinal to investigate the rapid out-of-context development sending rents sky-high.

Bushwick at the time was changing quickly, and the unchecked gentrification was threatening to displace the long-time residents who had held the neighborhood together for generations. The community decided to make a unique pitch to the city and put forward a rezoning plan that would allow them to determine what their neighborhood would like in the future. After a four-year collaboration among the council members, local stakeholders, and Bushwick residents, the Bushwick Community Plan (BCP) was released in 2018.

The BCP was historic – a true community-led effort, it balanced the community’s need for new and affordable housing with the preservation of manufacturing jobs that provided so many in the community paths to the middle class. The plan made recommendations for new green spaces, expanded transit options, and increased access to healthcare. It thought comprehensively about what healthy growth looked like for a working-class neighborhood beloved by residents who hoped to stay.

Mayor de Blasio didn’t see it that way. Instead of studying the community’s proposal, the de Blasio Administration decided to put forward their own plan – a plan that completely ignored the community’s voice and neglected to provide the resources and safeguards that long-time residents were advocating for. In January 2020, Mayor de Blasio formally rejected the community-driven proposal and the 2,000 new units of deeply affordable housing that would have come with it.

Read the Bushwick Community Plan.

During Antonio’s time as a Council Member, landlords in gentrifying neighborhoods like Williamsburg and Bushwick frequently turned to construction as harassment to push long-term residents out of their homes, especially those living in rent-regulated housing. Tenants were forced to endure dangerous conditions such as collapsed ceilings, cracked floors, lead contaminated dust, and no heat or hot water while landlords endlessly stalled the completion of renovations – often with little or no consequences.

As Chair of the City Council’s Progressive Caucus, Antonio fought for years alongside the Stand for Tenant Safety Coalition to pass the Stand for Tenant Safety package, a group of bills that help the Department of Buildings to better protect tenants from pervasive construction as harassment.

Passed in 2017, the Stand for Tenant Safety package empowers tenants, making it easier for them to take abusive property managers to court, and increases penalties and enforcement against illegal construction. While construction as harassment remains a problem, it is not as pervasive as it once was – especially after rent laws changed at the state level in 2019. The Stand for Tenant Safety bills remain important tools that tenants can use to protect themselves and their families from unsafe living conditions and help them stay in the neighborhoods they’ve long called home.