NYC Clears Red Tape For Small Business Owners

Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Monday announced a package of more than 50 regulatory reforms to reduce the paperwork and bureaucratic burden facing the city’s roughly 180,000 small businesses.

OPEN for Small Business is a set of reforms for food service and food retail businesses, transportation businesses, retailers, child care providers, industrial and commercial businesses, personal care businesses, nonprofits running bingo and games of chance licenses, and other businesses.

"You cannot tell the story of New York without our small businesses, and yet our city has often made it too hard for them to open their doors and keep them open," said Mamdani said in a statement. "The owners tell us the same thing again and again. What wears them down is not simply the cost of any one fee, it is the paperwork and the inconsistency they face when dealing with their own government."

The package includes proposals to:

• Waive mayoral approval for the sidewalk café program immediately, removing a layer of review that adds time without adding scrutiny, and will waive it for the roadway café program once outdoor dining reforms are enacted.
• Work with the state to eliminate the second permit restaurants need just to serve ice cream and other frozen desserts, a requirement left over from decades-old dairy regulation, on top of the general permit they already hold to serve food safely.
• Repeal the license a bodega needs to sell fruit, flowers, or soft drinks from a stand just outside its own door, on top of the license it already holds to sell those same goods inside.
• Publish a single plain-language guide for child care providers covering Department of Health, Department of Buildings, and the Fire Department together, so opening a center means one playbook instead of three separate agency timelines.
• Relocate the Health Academy, the city's only in-person location for the food protection course every restaurant needs, from the Upper West Side to 125 Worth Street, so an owner in Canarsie or Throgs Neck no longer loses most of a day just getting certified.
• Remove the requirement that mobile food vendors carry a paper copy of their commissary agreement on the cart at all times, even though the city already has the same document on file and can look it up itself.
• Extend license renewal cycles for newsstand operators, pawnbrokers, second-hand dealers, sightseeing bus companies, scale dealer repairers, and storage warehouses.
• Cut Department of Environmental Protection registration fees for cooking equipment and food trucks from $110 to $0 for the next twelve months.
• Reduce the maximum penalty from $600 to $500 for three common food safety violations, and replace two overlapping city and state allergy-poster requirements with a single poster that satisfies both, so owners face one standard instead of the risk of multiple violations.
• Remove outdated regulations on bingo and game of chance licenses held by nonprofit fundraisers, including prize caps set well below what today's fundraisers are worth, so nonprofits and the businesses that host them aren't boxed in by decades-old limits.

Click here to read all the reforms. 

The mayor also signed an executive order that will assign a single client manager to all businesses through the Small Businesses Services' NYC Business Express Service Team; clarifying a business owner's rights during city inspections; and address small business costs beyond regulation.

“I grew up watching my family navigate the same maze so many small business owners face, the paperwork, the fines, and the deciphering of city regulations," said said SBS Commissioner Kenny Minaya. "As we dramatically expand our NYC Business Express Service Team, new businesses will have a dedicated case manager to help them open their business quickly."