Bill to End Adulterated Heating Oil Stalls in City Council

Yesterday we reported that the hazardous scam of blending used motor oil with heating oil continues in thousands of New York City buildings. Now the Daily News reports that a bill introduced in the City Council last year to end the age-old practice is lost in legislative limbo.

After a long litany of investigations and convictions for misdeeds within the heating oil industry, Antonio Reynoso, chair of the City Council's Sanitation Committee, Antonio Reynoso, proposed a bill to stop the scamming by requiring dealers and drivers to be vetted and licensed by the city Business Integrity Commission. Last week, BIC Commissioner Daniel Brownell, a former prosecutor himself, ticked off the list of the bill's supporters during testimony before Reynoso's committee.

Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance Jr. has signed off, along with the Real Estate Board of New York, the Environmental Defense Fund and the Waterkeeper Alliance. "All of those organizations are deeply concerned by the wide reach of the fraud and want to know what our government is doing to correct this," Brownell said.

The combining of used motor oil with heating oil is legal under some conditions – if it’s burned in a high-powered boiler like those usually found in factories. But the adulterated oil continues to find its way into thousands of boilers that can’t burn it properly, sending particulate matter into the air that causes asthma and other diseases among human. Yet Reynoso’s bill has failed to gain traction with this City Council colleagues.

The obstacle is the heating oil industry and Local 553 of the Teamsters, which represents 1,000 heating oil workers. Karen Imas, spokeswoman for the New York Oil Heating Association, says only a few bad actors plague what she says is mostly a clean industry and that the city Department of Consumer Affairs, which already polices the industry, needs to do a better job.