Brendan Sexton, who as New York Metropolis’s sanitation commissioner initiated what on the time was the nation’s most formidable obligatory rubbish recycling program and employed the primary ladies as uniformed employees within the division’s 105-year historical past, died on Tuesday at his residence 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 underneath 5 mayors. After leaving metropolis authorities, he remained lively as a civic chief: He oversaw the Municipal Artwork Society’s mandate for historic preservation, the Occasions Sq. Alliance and its millennial celebration in 2000, and the South Avenue Seaport Museum because it struggled to advance from municipal stewardship.
But it surely was his marketing campaign for curbside recycling that had the best impression on New Yorkers. The Metropolis 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 metallic cans in their very own plastic luggage or receptacles for curbside pickup. The brand new guidelines had been to be phased in over the following a number of years.
“What we’re doing is working a cultural revolution, a social revolution,” Mr. Sexton, who had been sanitation commissioner since 1986, mentioned on the time. “We’re altering the way in which property homeowners handle their property, the way in which homeowners handle their kitchens.”
His aim was to have 25 p.c of town’s rubbish recycled inside 5 years. However with town dealing with a funds hole by the early Nineteen Nineties, this system proved prohibitively costly. As we speak, in response to the Sanitation Division, solely about 17 p.c of all town’s rubbish is recycled.
Throughout Mr. Sexton’s tenure, which ended later in 1989, landlords had been ordered to part out incinerators in condominium homes. Town additionally launched into a pilot resource-recovery program that burned rubbish, producing steam to be offered to the facility utility Consolidated Edison, and started an experiment to seize methane fuel from landfills.
The challenges of disposing of thousands and thousands of tons of stable 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, town sought different locations to bury stable waste. The Mobro, stuffed with 3,000 tons of rubbish, departed from Lengthy Island. However 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 Division incinerator within the Gravesend Bay part of Brooklyn.
Though Mr. Sexton would later play the position of aesthetic guardian with the Municipal Artwork Society, it was he who pursued a program underneath which automobiles that ignored alternate-side parking laws had been plastered with lurid chartreuse stickers proclaiming that they had been illegally obstructing mechanical avenue sweepers. The Metropolis Council ended the sticker program in 2012.
“Brendan was a first-rate analytic expertise who additionally possessed sturdy administrative abilities 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 a capability to navigate complicated points and collaborate with various political stakeholders, abilities that enabled progress on issues like launching town’s landmark recycling system and cleansing up Occasions Sq.,” Mr. Steisel added, in an electronic mail.
Eric A. Goldstein, a senior legal professional and New York Metropolis environmental director for the Pure Sources Protection Council, mentioned by electronic mail that Mr. Sexton was “a terrific buddy of our surroundings, and one of many nicest individuals to anybody and everybody who met him.” He added, “Even when he was delivering unhealthy information, he did it in a method that made you need to like him.”
In 1986, two ladies who had accomplished their coaching had been sworn in as 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 and a sociology professor at New York College. His mom, Hilda Zack Rogin, was a professor at American College in Washington and in addition taught highschool in Washington and New York. The household moved to New York when he was 4.
After graduating from Forest Hills Excessive Faculty in Queens, Mr. Sexton earned a bachelor’s diploma in experimental psychology at New York College in 1969. (He would return to the college years later as a medical professor on the Wagner Graduate Faculty of Public Service.)
Along with his daughter Tara, Mr. Sexton is survived by his spouse, Karen Dalzeell; 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.
Within the 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 Battle. In 1966, whereas he was nonetheless an undergraduate, he and Ms. Ossa, his spouse on the time, and a buddy, 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 Dependancy Companies Company 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 Administration Advisory Board.
‘Immediately the entire metropolis opened as much as me,” Mr. Sexton recalled. “After that, I wouldn’t work anyplace else.”
He grew to become director of corruption prevention and administration evaluation for town’s Division of Investigation in 1978. Two years later, he was named deputy director of the Workplace of Operations, and in 1983 he was appointed the workplace’s director, reporting on to Deputy Mayor Nathan Leventhal.
When Mr. Leventhal was town’s housing commissioner, he later recalled, Mr. Sexton, who was then on the investigation division, would periodically take him to process for one factor or one other.
“I discovered his presence form of troublesome,” Mr. Leventhal instructed The New York Occasions in 1986. “However once I grew to become deputy mayor, he was the primary individual I known as to return over and work for me. I let him unfastened on your entire metropolis authorities, and nobody was ever secure after that.”