The administration of Mayor Eric Adams is expected to announce Jimmy Oddo, the current city buildings commissioner, will lead the Department of Sanitation, according to multiple people briefed on the plan.
He replaces Jessica Tisch, who left the trash-collection agency to become police commissioner late last month. Tisch replaced the interim commissioner, Thomas Donlon, who stepped in briefly after Edward Caban resigned amid a corruption probe, but couldn’t hold the job full-time because he himself was also under FBI scrutiny.
Adams had tapped Oddo to lead the Department of Buildings in April 2023 following the resignation of the former commissioner Eric Ulrich — who was indicted by the Manhattan district attorney’s office in a separate case.
A spokesperson for the mayor, Kayla Mamalek, said in a statement that “no appointments are official until and unless we make an announcement.”
Oddo has been a part of the Adams team since 2022, working first as chief of staff for Deputy Mayor of Operations Meera Joshi before going to the Department of Buildings.
As a Republican, Oddo was previously Staten Island borough president and was in the City Council between 1999 and 2013. He did not respond to multiple calls from THE CITY seeking comment.
Under Adams, the sanitation department embarked on an ambitious plan to fully containerize curbside trash pickup and other initiatives to make the city cleaner.
The “trash revolution,” as Adams and former commissioner Tisch dubbed it, aims to clear the city’s streets of the piles of garbage bags that are magnets for rats, and create new set-out times to thin out the “rat buffet.”
As of last month, all residential properties with nine units or fewer are now mandated to set out their trash in containers 55 gallons or smaller. Larger buildings don’t have to use the bins because of a plan to eventually have built-in, on-street containers that will be first rolled out in the spring in parts of Manhattan.
The DSNY in November also unveiled the new official NYC Bin, which will eventually be required for all properties.
And following the passage of a ballot proposal last month, the Department of Sanitation will also now oversee cleaning more areas of New York City, including parks and other city-owned parcels of land.
