Alliance Recycling is either a neighborhood boon or a blight, depending on whom you ask.

Co-owner Lance Finkel says the operation, located on Peralta Street near the West Oakland border with Emeryville between 34th and 35th streets, has 18 full-time employees and pays out $5 million annually to people who bring glass, metal and plastic bottles.

But in the words of Oakland assistant city administrator Claudia Cappio, Alliance has been problematic “going on 10 to 15 years.”

When the city last year decided to investigate more intensively — and as City Attorney Barbara Parker wrote in her September newsletter — it discovered Alliance was issued more than 40 citations and $17,750 in fines, Cappio said.

Twenty-three citations of $250 each were issued from April 2 to July 3 of last year for “Alliance customers obstructing public right of way,” according to documents from Cappio and Parker’s offices.

Six were for its gate being open despite no business being conducted; five of those had no fine, just a warning. There were citations for loitering, for an Alliance truck double-parking, for a customer double-parking, several more for customers sorting materials on the street, and for trash, debris and abandoned shopping carts.

More recently, the city fined Alliance $2,592.75 for alleged illegal dumping. Finkel said it had simply piled up abandoned furniture from a park across the street to facilitate its removal, something Alliance had done for years.

Some say those bringing recyclable materials to Alliance leave trash and often buy drugs in the park.

The fines and citations were headed for a hearing that Alliance’s attorney, Rena Rickles, said she was confident she would win. But Finkel’s partner, Joe Zadik, said he couldn’t take it anymore.

So they settled with the city, agreeing to shut the place down within a year. That was in August 2015. Alliance is supposed to close next month or be fined if it continues to operate.

“I believe we would have won,” Rickles said, but “there was always going to be another one right behind it. The city was after them. The noisiest part of the neighborhood wanted them out.”

Zadik and Finkel say they have no prospective sites to relocate to. Discussions with the city over possible places have gone nowhere, they said.

“We try to reach a balance,” the city’s Cappio said in a telephone interview.

“A closing of this kind of business is not without consequence. The city worked diligently to try to create a compliance framework for it,” she said.

Alliance’s situation, Zadik said, “is a story between haves and have-nots. Rich people moved here from San Francisco who want to push the poor people out. The city doesn’t care.”

Alliance has been operating in West Oakland since the late 1970s. Its current owners bought the business in July 2013.

Finkel also runs Lakeside Recycling in Jack London Square.

“Never had a complaint,” he says of his family’s 80 years there.

The documentary “Dogtown Redemption” casts the operation in a sympathetic light, tracking three individuals who depended on the income they made by taking recyclables to Alliance to eke out a gritty survival.

When lawyers surveyed customers to see what they would do to earn money after the recycling center closed, stealing and prostitution were common responses.

“If this neighborhood thought they had a problem before, they have no idea what could happen when the recycling center closes,” Rickles said. “This is really going to destroy that neighborhood.”

The people who bring items to sell will not have adequate food and shelter, she predicted.

“We’re endangering their lives,” she said.