Brendan Sexton, who as New York City’s sanitation commissioner initiated what on the time was the nation’s most bold obligatory rubbish recycling program and employed the primary girls as uniformed employees within the division’s 105-year historical past, died on Tuesday at his dwelling in Manhattan. He was 78.
The trigger was prostate most cancers, his daughter Dr. Tara Shelby Sexton mentioned.
An indefatigable public servant, Mr. Sexton labored below 5 mayors. After leaving metropolis authorities, he remained lively as a civic chief: He oversaw the Municipal Art Society’s mandate for historic preservation, the Times Square Alliance and its millennial celebration in 2000, and the South Street Seaport Museum because it struggled to advance from municipal stewardship.
But it was his marketing campaign for curbside recycling that had the best influence on New Yorkers. The City Council handed laws in 1989 requiring thousands and thousands of households to bundle newspapers, magazines and cardboard and separate them from different trash, and to put glass bottles and steel cans in their very own plastic luggage or receptacles for curbside pickup. The new guidelines have been to be phased in over the subsequent a number of years.
“What we are doing is working a cultural revolution, a social revolution,” Mr. Sexton, who had been sanitation commissioner since 1986, mentioned on the time. “We are changing the way property owners manage their property, the way householders manage their kitchens.”
His aim was to have 25 % of the town’s rubbish recycled inside 5 years. But with the town dealing with a funds hole by the early Nineties, this system proved prohibitively costly. Today, based on the Sanitation Department, solely about 17 % of all the town’s rubbish is recycled.
During Mr. Sexton’s tenure, which ended later in 1989, landlords have been ordered to part out incinerators in condominium homes. The metropolis additionally launched into a pilot resource-recovery program that burned rubbish, producing steam to be offered to the ability utility Consolidated Edison, and commenced an experiment to seize methane fuel from landfills.
The challenges of disposing of thousands and thousands of tons of strong waste yearly captured nationwide consideration in the summertime of 1987, when Mr. Sexton oversaw the ill-fated launch of what was in all probability essentially the most well-known rubbish barge in historical past, the Mobro 4000.
With its landfill websites full, the town sought different locations to bury strong waste. The Mobro, crammed with 3,000 tons of rubbish, departed from Long Island. But after the fabric was rejected by six states and three nations out of fears that it was contaminated with medical waste, the barge lumbered again to New York, ending its 162-day, 6,000-mile odyssey at a Sanitation Department incinerator within the Gravesend Bay part of Brooklyn.
Although Mr. Sexton would later play the position of aesthetic guardian with the Municipal Art Society, it was he who pursued a program below which automobiles that ignored alternate-side parking rules have been plastered with lurid chartreuse stickers proclaiming that they have been illegally obstructing mechanical road sweepers. The City Council ended the sticker program in 2012.
“Brendan was a first-rate analytic talent who also possessed strong administrative skills and savvy,” mentioned Norman Steisel, who preceded Mr. Sexton as sanitation commissioner in the course of the Edward I. Koch administration and later served as David N. Dinkins’s first deputy mayor.
“He demonstrated an ability to navigate complex issues and collaborate with diverse political stakeholders, skills that enabled progress on things like launching the city’s landmark recycling system and cleaning up Times Square,” Mr. Steisel added, in an e mail.
Eric A. Goldstein, a senior lawyer and New York City environmental director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, mentioned by e mail that Mr. Sexton was “a great friend of our environment, and one of the nicest people to anyone and everyone who met him.” He added, “Even when he was delivering bad news, he did it in a way that made you want to like him.”
In 1986, two girls who had accomplished their coaching have been sworn in as the town’s first uniformed sanitation employees. The greater than 130 males who took the oath with them cheered.
Brendan John Sexton was born on June 29, 1945, in Detroit. His father, additionally named Brendan, was a union chief. His mom, Hilda Zack Rogin, was a professor at American University in Washington and likewise taught highschool in Washington and New York. The household moved to New York when he was 4.
After graduating from Forest Hills High School in Queens, Mr. Sexton earned a bachelor’s diploma in experimental psychology at New York University in 1969. (He would return to the college years later as a medical professor on the Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.)
In addition to his daughter Tara, Mr. Sexton is survived by his spouse, Karen Dalzell;. two sons, the actor Brendan Sexton III and David Zalk; three daughters, Amber Sexton, Oona Dalzell-Sexton and Zoë Dalzell-Sexton; 4 stepchildren, Eben Sexton and Lisa, Ilona and Carinna Abitbol; one grandchild; three step-grandchildren; and a sister, Patricia Hersh. His marriages to Lynn Ossa and Judith Ann Ford resulted in divorce.
In the Nineteen Sixties, Mr. Sexton was arrested for collaborating in civil rights demonstrations as a member of the Congress of Racial Equality; he was additionally a conscientious objector in the course of the Vietnam War. In 1966, whereas he was nonetheless an undergraduate, he and Ms. Ossa, his spouse on the time, and a good friend, Jan Stacy, based Encounter Inc., a therapy program for younger drug abusers that operated in Greenwich Village till 1972.
Mr. Sexton was laid off by the Addiction Services Agency in the course of the metropolis’s fiscal disaster of the mid-Nineteen Seventies however was subsequently appointed to assist resolve the disaster as a member of the Mayor’s Management Advisory Board.
“Suddenly the whole city opened up to me,” Mr. Sexton recalled. “After that, I wouldn’t work anywhere else.”
He turned director of corruption prevention and administration overview for the town’s Department of Investigation in 1978. Two years later, he was named deputy director of the Office of Operations, and in 1983 he was appointed the workplace’s director, reporting on to Deputy Mayor Nathan Leventhal.
When Mr. Leventhal was the town’s housing commissioner, he later recalled, Mr. Sexton, who was then on the investigation division, would periodically take him to activity for one factor or one other.
“I found his presence kind of troublesome,” Mr. Leventhal advised The New York Times in 1986. “But when I became deputy mayor, he was the first person I called to come over and work for me. I let him loose on the entire city government, and no one was ever safe after that.”
Source: www.nytimes.com