NYC’s Air Quality Complaint Program Only Accepts Complaints in English
Bronx Council Member Calls It "Unacceptable and Discriminatory"
For years, clean air advocates have been complaining that the city’s Citizen Air Complaint Program is not accessible to New Yorkers with limited English proficiency.
The program, which launched in 2019, allows residents to report commercial vehicles for idling in exchange for a portion of the fine money. All questions on the complaint form are required to be answered in English, which advocates say is discriminatory in a city where approximately 25 percent of residents have limited English proficiency.
According to the City of New York, air pollution causes about 2,400 deaths per year in New York City.
Council Member Justin Sanchez, whose South Bronx district is largely Spanish speaking and is one of the most polluted in the city, said “only taking complaints in English silences people who are already disenfranchised and marginalized.”
“It is unacceptable and discriminatory,” said Sanchez.
A spokesperson for the Department of Environmental Protection, which runs the Citizens Air Compliant Program, told The Footprint that complaints must be submitted in English “to prevent mistranslated information.”
The DEP spokesperson said the language restriction “is a legal requirement from the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings.” The spokesperson explained that “the information is used in legal proceedings, and any mistranslation carries a substantial risk of dismissal.”
In 2023, Council Member Alexa Avilés introduced a bill that would require the New York City Department of Environmental Protection to translate all parts of the Citizen’s Air Complaint Portal into the languages other than English that are most commonly spoken by residents of the City with limited English proficiency.
Despite overwhelming support within the city council and a total of 35 cosponsors, that bill never moved forward.
Since then, the DEP has translated instructions for the portal into 13 total languages, but continues to require complaints themselves to be filled out in English.
“We’re not sure what the holdup has been,” said Justin Wood, the director of policy at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, an advocacy group that testified in favor of that legislation.
“It’s just common sense,” said Wood. “This program should be as accessible as possible, and in all the major languages.”
On January 29, 2026, Council Member Avilés reintroduced her bill that would require the Department of Environmental Protection to translate all parts of the Citizen’s Air Complaint portal into languages other than English.
So far, Council Members Justin Sanchez, Farah Louis, Phil Wong, and Chris Banks have co-sponsored the bill.
“In addition to the immediate relief that is being suspended by inaccessibility, you have to also consider the data that is being lost,” said Sanchez.
Sanchez pointed out that since enforcement is determined by citizen participation, the language restriction for complaints can lead to chronically lower enforcement in areas with high rates of non-English speakers.
In 2024 Rohit Aggarwala, commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection under Mayor Eric Adams, testified that the Citizen Air Quality Complaint program “has essentially done nothing to improve air quality in many EJ communities.”
“EJ” communities, or environmental justice communities, are communities that are burdened by environmental inequities, according to the Mayor’s Office for Climate Environmental Justice.
According to Aggarwala’s testimony, “most civilian complaints issued are in the Manhattan core, wealthier parts of Brooklyn, and western Queens,” while “there is minimal attention to the areas that need it the most.”
“An unintentional impact of this program has been to shift DEP’s own enforcement out of many EJ neighborhoods,” said Aggarwala, explaining that most citizen complaints come from Manhattan.
“New Yorkers speak more languages than any other city in America and perhaps the world,” said Sanchez. “If this form is going to work for New York, it has to work with all New Yorkers in mind.”
New York Lawyers for the Public Interest said that in addition to increasing accessibility for New Yorkers with limited English proficiency, the city should take steps to promote the program in communities that have been most negatively impacted by pollution.
Wow, hope Mamdani thinks about doing the right thing going forward to end the discrimination.
Great article! Hopefully the new DEP Commissioner can fix this discrimination quickly.
Unfortunately, while it's clear that we need more participants, Rit Aggarwala's data about program participation was misleading then and is far, far outdated now. You can see much better maps here: https://idling.nyc/maps.php
These maps show that, right now, the program heavily covers the places in New York with the highest PM2.5 levels, namely, Midtown and downtown Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn, as well as Hunts Point in the Bronx. But we still need to do more to help folks in other parts of the Bronx, as well as Queens and Brooklyn, participate in the program! Fixing the language discrimination would surely help!