You can’t fight City Hall; you also can’t throw pizza at it.
A pro-Trump artist from Staten Island tried to take a stand for fossil fuel-burning pizzerias subjected to new city environmental regulations Wednesday by wasting perfectly-good pizza slices at City Hall.
Scott LoBaido’s stunt aimed to castigate city lawmakers over new regulations that require pizzerias and matzah bakeries which employ wood- and coal-fired ovens installed before May 2016 to install expensive emission-control devices, which aim to cut pollutants by up to 75%.
The regulation aims to cut a slice of carbon emissions out of the atmosphere amid an ongoing period of climate change. But LoBaido, in a profanity-laced tirade, told amNewYork that the new rule is an attack on small business.
“I’m a New Yorker my whole life, and this piece of s–t mayor, the City Council, is pulling more bulls–t to get the small businesses to move out of the City,” LoBaido said.
The pizza stunt seemed to be about more than just environmental regulations. LoBaido used the effort to amplify right-wing talking points opposing the city’s sanctuary city policy, and suggested that the city’s elected officials focus more on combating what he called the “illegal immigrant invasion.”
Under the watchful eye of the NYPD, LoBaido addressed about 20 of his supporters and compared his action to the Boston Tea Party — the 1773 event in which colonial Americans protested “taxation without representation” from a monarchy an ocean away.
“Our people back in the day in Boston, those Bostonians loved their tea. They worshiped their tea. They sacrificed and threw it in the harbor,” LoBaido said. “And that’s what we’re doing here today. You gotta make sacrifices to make history to make f****** change.”
The pizza oven rules, however, were approved by the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, last year, and are due to take effect on April 27. The DEP is overseen by a commissioner appointed by the duly-elected mayor of New York.
And unlike the tax on tea which impacted all American colonists, the regulation impacts about 130 businesses across the five boroughs, the New York Post reported; there are more than 2,000 pizzerias across the city.
Nevertheless, on LoBaido went with his pizza protest Wednesday.
He and one of his supporters managed to throw about 5 to 6 slices of pizza over the fence before the NYPD stepped in and arrested them, which drew chants of “shame on you” from the crowd — some of whom brought their Trump flags with them.
Peter Dimiceli from Staten Island was astonished at LoBaido’s littering arrest.
“There are so many other things for this mayor to be worried about right now,” Dimiceli said. “There is so much going on in New York City that this is what we’re doing?”
It was the second time LoBaido flung pizza slices onto city government property over the pizza oven rules. Last June, he did the same at Gracie Mansion after news of the new regulations broke.
