The specter of parking in Brooklyn continued to haunt new Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso last week when an eagle-eyed observer spotted his vehicle parked on the street near Borough Hall with an expired registration sticker in the window and outdated license plates from his days in the New York City Council still affixed to the vehicle, the New York Post first reported.
Dogged anonymous Twitter user @placardabuse, who diligently records the city’s employees abusing their city-granted parking privileges, posted a photo of the beep’s Nissan parked on what appears to be Joralemon Street, behind Borough Hall, last Friday evening.
Sitting along a stretch of curb reserved for Borough Hall employees, as indicated by a sign just a few feet in front of the car, the issue was not necessarily where the vehicle was parked but that Reynoso still hadn’t removed his easily-identifiable “NYC COUNCIL 34” license plates. Upon further inspection, the photographer found that the car’s registration, displayed on the front windshield, had expired in December 2021. A parking placard issued by the city’s Department of Transportation was partially obscured by the registration sticker, but the user said it, too, was expired.
“Hi @BKBP Reynoso,” they said in the post. “Is this your car, with the expired @nysdmv registration, using an expired @NYCCouncil placard?”
Reynoso — who has talked a big game about ridding Borough Hall of placard-draped, plaza-parked vehicles — owned up to the mishap the following morning.
“Yes, that’s my bad, genuinely,” the former councilmember said in a reply to the tweet. “This car is the bane of my existence. Seldom used, I brought it out to handle all these issues. Removed Gov’t plates and returning placard. Dealing with DMV on registration. Will no longer have plates or placard moving forward. No excuses.”
According to public database How’s My Driving NY, Reynoso has wracked up a dozen infractions since 2018, mostly for parking in No Standing zones or missing or expired inspection or registration stickers, though he was issued a ticket for failing to stop at a red light in 2018.
Reynoso has been vocally supportive of safer streets since his days in the council, earning the endorsement of street safety focused political group StreetsPAC during the borough president’s race. In January, less than one full week after he stepped into his new position, Reynoso unilaterally banned parking from the plaza in front of Borough Hall. Reynoso’s predecessor, now-mayor Eric Adams, was widely criticized for allowing his employees to park their private vehicles on the public plaza during his tenure as Brooklyn beep.
Last month, alongside north Brooklyn Councilmember Lincoln Restler, the beep called for an end to minimum parking requirements, which mandate a number of new parking spaces be created in tandem with new development, in transit-heavy areas like Downtown Brooklyn.
“The last place we need developers to build accessory parking is in areas with substantial access to public transportation,” read a letter to the Department of City Planning signed by a group of elected officials, including Reynoso. “We need to reduce car ownership in our city, and requiring new parking within close proximity to public transit has the opposite effect.”
The beep’s office did not immediately respond to an inquiry asking whether the old plates had been removed from the vehicle and the registration updated.
