Brooklyn Heights Biz Owner Fined for Ads on Poles

By on December 4, 2009 12:28 pm in Brooklyn Heights

The Brooklyn Paper reports on one area business owner who’s been slapped with fines for taping fliers to lamposts in the neighborhood – but did officials over react?:

Brooklyn Paper: A Brooklyn Heights small business owner faces thousands in fines — even though she only posted one thing on a Court Street lamppost.

The owner of Sketch & Hammer, Susan Hager, freely admits that she taped an envelope containing 15 of business cards for her custom deck and garden design firm on that lamppost back in April.

But she is fighting the decision by the sanitation worker to write separate summons for each of the business cards rather than for the one envelope that contained them all.

“It said I’ll be paying a minimum of $75 for each card, and I could ultimately pay up to $3,000 for the whole deal,” said Hager, who received the summonses in the mail last week. “I don’t mind paying $75, but $3,000?

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  • JM

    Hmmmm…. how much did they fine David Yassky for those riduculous 4 foot tall signs he had on the lamp posts around election time?
    What a stupid abuse of power.
    Hope saner heads prevail here.

  • nabeguy

    Does seem absurd. My question is why you received she a summons from sanitation for something taped to a lamp post which is under DOT jurisdiction? Could it be that the envelope came open and dumped the cards on the sidewalk? Still seems an abuse of power…if you mix plastics and cardboard together, you only get fined for the bag, not for each individual item in it.

  • nabeguy

    Should read: “why she received a summons”

  • my2cents

    She should have parked in a bike lane instead.

  • nabeguy

    Or become a Presbyterian.

  • Anon

    I’ve mixed feelings about this. On one hand I think it’s an excessive fine. On the other, she said she’d doesn’t mind paying $75, which implies that small fine’s not enough of a deterrent. You can bet she wont try that same thing again after being hit with a $3k fine.

  • my2cents

    Seems kind of crappy to fine her for each card, when it was the envelope that was taped to the post, not the cards.

  • Sticky

    What about the handyman ads in the north Heights?

  • Andrew Porter

    A couple of days after the election, Yassky’s enormous signs were still up at the corner of Clark and Henry, because they were attached with wire. I borrowed a wire cutter from a local business and removed them.

    The most obnoxious signs remain those “Moving $18″ signs which are up all over the city, not just BH.