For immediate release (3/11/99)
City Council Releases Text of New Vending Law; ALSO: 100 streets to close on or about March 13th
by Robert Lederman, President of A.R.T.I.S.T. (Artists' Response To Illegal State Tactics)<ARTISTpres@aol.com>
provided through OPENAIR-MARKET NET
On 2/10/99 the City Council released the full text of its proposed new vending law, [intro #511]. It took more than two years for the Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) and the City Council Members in their employ to come up with this new law [Council Members Freed, Fisher, and Dear worked intensively on the bill]. The first page contains an insincere statement about the valuable role vendors play in the life of New York City and a false claim that the new law is intended to be "fair" to vendors. The next 53 pages show how totally unfair they intend to be. The full text of the new law and a complete list of all restricted streets is available in the basement of City Hall for free to anyone who requests it.
HIGHLIGHTS OF THE NEW LAW
1. Warrants. All vendors, are required to obtain a warrant [food, books, art, general merchandise, veteran]. A warrant is a real estate contract between a vendor and the City. A warrant gives you a right to vend in a particular location on a sidewalk. Without a warrant you will not be able to sell anywhere. While the new law says warrants will be assigned based on a lottery the law also allows the City to use whatever system it wants to distribute warrants. It is inevitable that warrants will be distributed by the same competitive bidding system that's in all NYC parks. The proposed law describes the City's intention to, "...obtain significant revenue from vendors..." Warrants in parks presently bid out for as much as $500,000 each per year.
2. Permits. Besides a vending license and a warrant every vendor will need to obtain a permit for an "approved" vending stand. All vending stands will be designed by the Art Commission, the Department of Health and a "representative of the vending industry". If you don't have an "approved" stand you will receive tickets, your display and merchandise will be confiscated and you'll lose your vending license.
3. Licenses. All vendors except book and art vendors [ who are now called Graphic Vendors] require a license [book vendors and artists are exempted from needing a license based on the First Amendment and the successful street artist lawsuit Bery et al v City of New York/Lederman et al v City of New York. However, they will need a permit and a warrant]. Graphic Vendors are now included in the category of General Vendor and are to be restricted from all streets that food and general vendors are restricted from.
4. Multiple Permit holders. The new law maintains the existing freeze or cap on the number of general vendor licenses in effect [850] and proposes reducing the total number of food vending permits to 3,000. However, multiple food vending permit holders can have up to 60 permits each and can also lease them out. They are also conveniently exempted from numerous other restrictions on vendors. While no individual vendor can have more than one warrant, an exemption is included giving multiple vending permit corporations a warrant for each permit. Vendors that have only one license and/or permit are not guaranteed a warrant. Without a warrant, no vendor including book vendors and artists will be able to vend anywhere.
5. Restricted streets. In addition to the thousands of streets already restricted to vending an additional 100 streets will become restricted on or about March 13. Virtually all of the thousands of restricted streets in the old Vending Law and the 100 new streets are within one or more of the City's BIDs. The list of newly restricted streets was printed in the City Record on 2/11/99.
6. Street Vendor Review Panel. This universally despised Panel will have a cosmetic name change to the Street Vendor Committee. Instead of having three members appointed by the Mayor the "Committee" will have nine members. They will include the Commissioners of the Departments of Health, Consumer Affairs and Transportation [all appointed by Mayor Giuliani], an additional member also appointed by the Mayor, 4 members appointed by the City Council and a Chairperson appointed jointly by the Mayor and the City Council Speaker. The Committee will decide all vending rules and restrictions which will then be submitted to the City Council for a vote.
WHAT IS THE NEW VENDING LAWS' PURPOSE?
Everyone involved in the vending issue knows that the existing law already contains far more restrictions than necessary to protect the public from congestion, food contamination or fraud. This proposed new law has the following four underlying purposes.
1. Racism .The first purpose of the new law is the elimination or "culling out" of the existing vendor population. This population is primarily made up of self-employed minorities and immigrants from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Central and South America. About half of the City's present vendors, like our slain fellow vendor Amadou Diallo, are black men. As both City Council reports on the BIDs made clear the BIDs have a documented history of harassing and targeting minorities especially black veterans, black homeless people and African vendors. The NYPD's Peddler Task Force was specially created to get rid of African vendors working in the midtown BIDs.
2. Payoffs and Political Donations. Corporate vendors that can bid hundreds of thousands of dollars for one spot or millions of dollars for multiple spots are what Giuliani and the BIDs want to replace the present vendors with. Aside from the money that can be made by selling the warrants, corporate vendors and their lobbyists can make large political contributions (as well as illegal payoffs) to the very long list of City officials involved in writing, administering and enforcing the proposed new vending law.
3. Advertising. Corporations like ABC/Disney are already using food vending carts for advertising in the midtown and downtown areas. McDonalds has also expressed an interest in getting into the vending business. Advertising revenue is what Giuliani and the BIDs see as the real future of vending on New York City streets.
4. Helping Multiple Permit Vending Corporations by Harming Independent Vendors. Another purpose of the new vending law is to help multiple permit holders keep their multiple permits. A few years ago the City Council outlawed multiple permits because they rightly believed they were unfair. Why should a corporation be able to have 60 permits when there is a total freeze on the issuance of new permits? [Some corporations used to have as many as 500 permits]. The history of vending is the story of the little guy, the immigrant and the minority individual being able to start their own business with a few dollars. Many of the parents and grandparents of today's generation of New Yorkers used the opportunity to vend in order to create a secure place for themselves within the American dream. This new vending law is the result of years of lobbying and political payoffs. None of its proposed changes help vendors or the general public in any way. All of its proposed changes serve the interests of BIDs, large corporations or existing multiple permit holders.
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This new law is another facet of the racism and class prejudice infecting the entire New York City government under Mayor Giuliani. Whether it's the Mayors' war on cabbies and street artists, his closing of homeless shelters, his attacks on CUNY and community gardens or his sending of so-called "elite" police teams into black neighborhoods to illegally search young men, this administration is constantly targeting minorities, the poor and immigrants. Most vendors fall into one or more of these categories.
Giuliani and BIDs view many New Yorkers as unwanted employees they'd like to downsize from N.Y.C. Inc. in order to increase profits. The reality is that New York is our city, that we are not employees and that these are our streets, not the BIDs' or the Mayor's streets. In our diversity and numbers vendors, (unlike the BIDs), are the real face of New York City, the diverse melting pot of immigrants that City officals are supposed to represent.
WHAT CAN VENDORS DO TO DEFEND OUR RIGHTS?
1. Immediately write your City Council Member. Make it clear that you take this new law very seriously. Don't beg for mercy. Demand that they vote against this bill and begin standing up for vendors. Tell them if they don't vote against it you will dedicate your time to making sure they are never elected to any office in New York City again. Vendors often work 12 hours a day 7 days a week on the street. We can do elected officials a lot of damage or a lot of good by handing out literature about them.
2. Immediately put a sign on your display, "Stop Harassing Vendors" or "Stop Giuliani's War on Vendors" etc. Use the advertising potential of your display to fight for your rights. Use your right to protest at your own stand to expose Giuliani and the BIDs. That is real First Amendment freedom of speech.
3. On March 13th peacefully refuse to give up your spot on the 100 newly restricted streets. Set up everyday with some kind of display, even a display of garbage and protest signs. Street artists resisted five years of daily arrests, confiscations and summonses before winning our lawsuit yet, we never gave up a single street. If you are still a vendor after all of your vending tickets, confiscations and court appearances nothing Giuliani does should ever intimidate you. We can easily defeat the increasingly unpopular Giuliani if we handle ourselves with dignity and restraint. The dictator is running for higher office. The last thing he needs is publicity about him persecuting vendors.
4. Form a new vendor group. With this new law the City has lumped all vendors into one group and made our job easier by making us one. Now is the time for all vendors, including unlicensed vendors, to become part of one organization which can speak with one voice for our mutual interests.
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In the past there have been individual groups for food vendors, a veterans group and a few attempts to create a group for general vendors. The history of those groups has not, for the most part, been successful. With the exception of the street artists group, no vendor group has any recognizable political agenda. Some vendors have mistakenly looked to multiple food permit corporations as "leaders". The new ordinance shows that these so-called "leaders" are not interested in helping vendors but in helping themselves. While they may have a right to try to get their multiple permits back or to negotiate special "deals", they are totally unqualified to represent any vendors. It is criminal for City officials to keep pretending to "negotiate" with vendors when they are actually dealing with multiple food permit holders. No vendor who understood what the warrants are about would ever support warrants yet, these multiple permit holders are trading acceptance of warrants in exchange for getting back their permits.
Ironically, the City officials doing the so-called "negotiating" plan to use the warrant/bidding system to eliminate the same multiple permit holders they are making this "deal" with. None of todays multiple permit holders can hope to outbid Disney or McDonalds.
Street artists, book vendors, veteran vendors, food vendors and general vendors will always have differences but we share a common interest in keeping vending in the hands of the people rather than letting corporate interests take control. The old vending ordinance is a mismash of special arrangements lobbied for and negotiated by multiple food vending permit holders. The mess of contradictions they created is a Frankenstein monster of bad ideas stitched together with social injustice. The proposed new vending law is even worse. It is nothing more than a new layer of corruptly arrived at rules which should be thrown in the garbage where they belong. Council Members that vote for this bill are traitors to the people of this City.
Robert Lederman, President of A.R.T.I.S.T.
(Artists' Response To Illegal State Tactics)
e mail ARTISTpres@aol.com
http://www.openair.org/alerts/artist/nyc.html
Note #1: Council Member Dear has been quoted as saying that very powerful corporate heads and at least one major real estate developer (allegedly Bernard Mendik) have approached him and the BIDs with the following problem. Corporations in the financial district and midtown are receiving many complaints from their employees about the City's plan to restrict or eliminate vendors. They are concerned that if the vendors are removed their employees will demand pay raises in order to be able to afford the higher prices at restaurants and stores. There are also management concerns that the extra time it will take to get a restaurant meal compared to lunch from a food cart will have negative effects on worker productivity and morale. If the thousands of employees working in a single 40 story office building were to come back 10 minutes later each day as a result of waiting in lines or for a table it could cost the buildings' corporate tenants millions of dollars per year. Let's get these unexpected allies into the fight.
Note #2: Multiple permit food vending corporations met with a number of Council Members this past week and asked them to vote for this bill. Council Members should fully understand that no actual vendors endorse this bill and that the press conference scheduled for 3/16 to announce it will be depicted as what it is; a corrupt sell-out of the City's vendors.
Note #3: The so-called vendor demo and press conference scheduled for 3/16 outside City Hall is a sham produced by multiple permit food vending corporations. It will be boycotted by the City's vendors.