The City Council today will discuss legislation requested by Mayor Bloomberg to add 1,500 fruit and vegetable carts to poor neighborhoods across the city.

Unions and small business groups have expressed concerns that the added competition could hurt supermarkets. Council Member Leroy Comrie, a sponsor of the proposal, said yesterday he expects the council to modify the bill to address some of these issues, but that the bill’s core goal of providing greater access to healthy food should remain. “I think all of this is something that clearly is workable,” he said.

Yesterday, the council passed a resolution condemning a longstanding Madison Square Garden tax exemption, a plan to reduce storm water overflow, and a bill prohibiting landlords from turning away tenants who pay rent with government aid.

Madison Square Garden’s $12 million-a-year tax exemption has come under attack from public officials who say it has long outlived its original purpose: keeping city sports teams from leaving town. Yesterday’s resolution calls on the state government to repeal the perk, which was enacted in 1982. “Madison Square Garden has gotten a free ride for long enough,” Speaker Christine Quinn said.

“The City Council’s decision to single out Madison Square Garden, an engine of economic activity that provides jobs for New Yorkers, when more than a billion dollars in benefits have been given to the other pro sports teams in New York City is obviously based on politics, not sound public policy,” a spokesman for MSG said in a statement yesterday.

The city would have to craft a new plan to reduce the billions of gallons of untreated sewage flowing into its waters from storm overflow under legislation passed yesterday. The bill requires the city to consider ways to reduce the amount of rainwater that enters sewage treatment plants, such as using new methods to absorb it before it reaches the sewers. Legislation also passed that would prevent tenants from being turned down by landlords based on their source of income, such as government aid.

Source: NYSun

The city, in an abrupt about-face, is now allowing store owners to put A-frame signs on the sidewalk again after cracking down this fall on the alleged sidewalk obstruction.

A new memo from the Department of Sanitation instructs enforcement officers not to issue tickets “as long as [the sign] does not impede pedestrian traffic.”

The rules were not as lenient in the fall when shopkeepers on commercial strips in Cobble Hill and Park Slope were penalized en masse with fines up to $300 for putting their signs on the sidewalk.

Back then, the Sanitation Department told The Brooklyn Paper that businesses were on the wrong side of the law if their signs protruded more than three feet from the front of a store.

The department confirmed the existence of the memo, first reported on brownstoner.com, but did not explain why it had adopted the new policy. But the businesses that got ticketed a few months ago were happy to speak up

“It’s funny that they would send out citations as if it was important and then drop it so suddenly,” said Berlin Reed, who works in Cobblestone Foods on Smith Street.

Other storeowners hope the sudden reversal will get their unresolved cases dismissed.

“Taking time out of work is silly,” said Zoe Bowick, co-owner of the Park Slope Fitness Collective, “but it’s punishment we shouldn’t have had.”

Source: The Brooklyn Paper

In the No Good Deed Goes Unpunished category, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg came up with a plan to provide fresh fruits and vegetables to low-income New Yorkers, and he got hit with rotten tomatoes from city street vendors.

The mayor’s plan — to provide an extra 1,500 cart permits for vendors willing to sell produce in neighborhoods underserved by grocery stores — has been widely hailed by public health advocates. The city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene says it will make it easier for an estimated 100,000 residents to buy vegetables.

But today a group of street vendors protested at City Hall, saying the proposal neglects to help the people on the other side of the food cart.

Rafael Samanez, the director of the advocacy group Vamos Unidos, said an extra 1,500 cart permits, under the city’s proposed Green Cart legislation, is far too low for the demand of street vendors. “The city has failed to meet the needs of thousands of low-income workers,” he said.

Mr. Samanez said the scarcity of permits means that even licensed food vendors must work outside the law to earn a living, skirting police enforcement while operating their carts without a license.

“Sometimes they seize our food and throw it into the garbage,” said Alma, a vendor who gave only her first name. She has sold soup from a cart in Manhattan for six years, and said a $2,000 fine for selling food without a cart permit would wipe out three to four months of earnings for her.

Mitchell Duneier, a sociology professor at Princeton University who has written a book on New York street vendors, said while the city should address the greater concerns of street vendors, “I thought it was an extraordinary idea and to the mayor’s credit that he wanted to find ways to bring healthy food to poor neighborhoods.”

Anthony Hogrebe, a spokesman for the City Council, said the purpose of the plan “is to get fresh fruits and vegetables into neighborhoods that lack access to healthy foods.” He said the number of permits for street vendors is a separate and more complex issue “that is an issue the Council would be willing to look at in the future.”

Mr. Samanez’s group said there is a current waiting list of 2,500 people seeking cart permits and estimates another 9,000 vendors are operating without permits. The group said the city has maintained the current limit, of 3,000 food carts and 853 merchandise carts, since 1979.

Jaime Casteneda, another soup vendor, said his father, who recently died, ran a food cart in Manhattan for 10 years.

“Every year, he would apply for a permit,” he said. “He never got one.”

Source: NY Times

This year, when the Liberty Plaza Greenmarket reopened, near the corner of Cedar and Church Streets, its organic overlords told the local streetfood sellers that they couldn’t share sidewalk space with arugula peddlers on Tuesday and Thursday from August to December. Then things got ugly: One of the vendors, Bangladeshi immigrant Mohammed Ali, 44, who’d been selling hot dogs on that stretch of Cedar Street for seven years, refused to move, and a Greenmarket manager called the cops. Ali was ticketed twice, for vending food “when ordered to move due to a market event” and not having twelve feet of path around his cart. Then, six officers seized his cart and everything in it. By the time an administrative-law judge dismissed the summonses later that afternoon (the city still insists the vendor was in violation of the twelve-feet rule), Ali’s Gatorade, Cokes, and hot dogs—buns, relish, and all— were gone. “I go to police station and I’m told it’s garbage,” he says. “They probably ate the hot dogs.”

In hock $1,300 for the food, Ali filed suit against the city and the police—with the help of the Urban Justice Center’s Street Vendor Project. “Everybody, politicians especially, loves the Greenmarkets—with their fashionable clientele and organic heirloom tomatoes—and bends over backwards for them while not supporting regular vendors,” e-mailed Ali’s lawyer, Sean Basinski.

“It’s not a contest, us versus them,” says Michael Hurwitz, executive director of the city’s Greenmarket program. It’s just about space. Still, he adds, “I do wish their food was a little bit healthier and was locally grown.”

Via NY Magazine 

YORKVILLE. Giuseppe Pecora decided to follow his customers here 20 years ago, when he opened Delizia pizzeria on the corner of 92nd Street and Second Avenue.

“We had a location on 73rd Street, and people used to take cabs down,” Pecora said.

The surrounding mom-and-pop shops were thriving, and Pecora’s business grew so much he built an enclosed café to accommodate another 45 diners. Then construction started last spring on the $3.8 billion Second Avenue Subway.

Concrete barriers, heavy equipment and chain-link fences now claim what used to be sidewalks on the west side of Second Avenue between 91st and 95th streets. Next month, construction will move to the east side.

“Foot traffic’s gone way down,” complained Pecora, who’s had to demolish his café and layoff 2 of his 17 employees.

Since April, revenues have dropped by $3 million from a year ago, according to 29 shop owners. Pecora conducted that survey in November by going door-to-door; losses of 20 percent were typical.

“Everybody said the same thing,” he recalled. “They were down 60, 70, 100 thousand dollars. Three places have closed.”

Yesterday the remaining small businesses appealed to their fellow New Yorkers to help out, as politicians unveiled a “Shop Second Avenue” campaign to lure people to the area.

“We need the Second Avenue Subway, but these businesses are taking a hit for all of us,” said the area’s City Councilman, Dan Garodnick. “We have to help them get through this difficult time.”

The MTA is pitching in with a marketing campaign, designing a logo and posting information on its Web site about the affected businesses. It’s promised to host weekly meetings and to develop better signage that will improve store visibility and help shoppers navigate the way to front doors.

Assemblymen Jonathan Bing and Micah Kellner are introducing legislation to offer tax credits and rebates to business owners as well as grants to tide them over. Bing said the area could become a tax-free zone for shoppers.

“The businesses farther down the avenue will face the same challenges,” Garodnick said. “This is our opportunity to create an effective strategy — a long-term strategy — to protect them as well.”

More to come

The first phase of the Second Avenue Subway project will extend the Q from 63rd to 96th streets. While Yorkville businesses will see construction subside in roughly three years, the project won’t be complete until 2014.

Via the NY METRO