QUESTION
What interventions does the sanitation department wish they had to address unlicensed street vending?
1:27:48
·
174 sec
The sanitation commissioner explains that the key driver of unlicensed street vending is the number of vending licenses issued by the city.
- Often when sanitation police arrive, vendors abandon their goods on the street
- The abandoned goods are brought to a lot where vendors can retrieve them
- If vendors cannot show a license when retrieving abandoned goods, they are issued an unlicensed vending summons
- This inflates the number of unlicensed vending summonses compared to other types of summonses
Pierina Ana Sanchez
1:27:48
So commissioner for you or or for your team, are there tools that you wish the department had and particularly more behavioral based interventions that you think would would change the dynamic that we see on the street?
Jessica Tisch
1:28:04
I think that the key driver of the dynamic that we see on the street is the number of licenses we give out as a as a city.
1:28:14
So I think that that's probably the the key thing.
Pierina Ana Sanchez
1:28:19
Thank you.
1:28:20
Yeah.
1:28:20
I mean, there's there's no secret that I believe in making licenses universally available, but then making it worth something.
1:28:26
Right?
1:28:27
You you're scared to lose that license, you value it.
1:28:29
You you know, it's it's your source of livelihood, and now you don't have to get your goods thrown out or or, you know, be under threat of whatever sort of enforcement action, I think, is is the path forward.
1:28:40
So I will always say that in every hearing that I have the opportunity So thank you for chairs for letting me say that today, but just look forward to working with the department more so on on this issue.
Jessica Tisch
1:28:50
And I just wanna make one one key point for your understanding and then also happy to talk about it with you at length later.
1:29:01
The data shows a higher number of unlicensed vending summonses than other summonses.
1:29:13
And you may look at it and say, wait a minute, told us compliance first approach we would expect to see that the number of unlicensed summonses would match the number the other numbers.
1:29:26
Few things happen that I wanna make sure everyone understands.
1:29:29
First, is oftentimes when our sanitation police show up, vendors abandon their property and they leave and they leave the property on the ground.
1:29:42
Rather than disposing of that property, we bring it back to our lot where other vendors or other people come and collect things like cars that are impounded.
1:29:57
And when a person who is abandoned property, on the street, vending property on the street, comes to collect the property that they have abandoned, they are issued and unlicensed, vending summons if they can't show a license.
1:30:16
And so I just wanna be very clear as you look through these numbers and we talk through these numbers that, among a few other things, inflates the number of unlicensed vending summonses that are issued as compared to the condition based summonses.
Pierina Ana Sanchez
1:30:36
That's that's really helpful.
1:30:37
It is it possible that when you share the data, you could highlight what percentage of cases.
1:30:42
Yeah.
1:30:42
I really debated having Ryan read out the table but the time wasn't enough.