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Q&A
DOT's approval process for outdoor dining applications
1:54:10
·
3 min
Council Member Brooks-Powers inquires about the DOT's approval process for outdoor dining applications. DOT officials provide a detailed explanation of the steps involved for both sidewalk and roadway cafe applications, including preliminary review, community board involvement, and final approval stages.
- Preliminary review involves checking site plans, photographs, and other documents
- Community boards have 40 days to review sidewalk cafe applications
- Roadway cafe applications require a public hearing with specific advertising requirements
- The process includes multiple stages of review and approval, involving various city departments
Selvena N. Brooks-Powers
1:54:10
Hi Commissioner, good to see you.
1:54:12
Great to see you.
1:54:14
I'm gonna start with the application process issues, just picking up on some of what Chair Menon had mentioned and what we heard from some of the businesses earlier.
1:54:26
Can you walk through DOT's approval process for applicants that submitted a license and revocable consent application?
1:54:35
Specifically, what does the preliminary review from DOT include and how long does it take?
Michelle Craven
1:54:43
So I'll walk you through for both the sidewalks and the roadways because they're separate processes set in the legislation.
1:54:49
The preliminary review process, we receive the application including the site plan, photographs, supporting documents.
1:54:56
We review to make sure we have everything that we need.
1:54:59
We review the site plan to make sure that it is complete and accurate and includes the information that we need to submit it to the community board for proper review.
1:55:08
So we look at the site plan itself, we look at the photographs that are submitted, we go onto Cyclomedia or Street View to get a sense of the lay of the land.
1:55:16
And if there are issues with the site plan, then we work with the applicant to improve the site plan and get it into good shape.
1:55:25
I think one thing we found early on is that we would send comments back and ask the restaurants to sort of update their site plan themselves and come back to us, and we realized that that was not efficient at all.
1:55:36
And so that's when we started up these Zoom meetings so we could just do everything online to the extent we could and basically redraw it ourselves.
1:55:43
But so that's the preliminary review process.
1:55:47
Then we submit the applications to the community board.
1:55:50
This is for sidewalk.
1:55:51
To the community board, the borough president, and the affected city council member.
1:55:55
The community boards have forty days to decide whether or not they're going to hold a public hearing or send comments back to us.
1:56:01
Depending on how things go with the community board, we may be required to hold a public hearing at DOT.
1:56:08
And so then we either approve the application, approve it with a modification, or deny.
1:56:14
If we approve or approve with modification then we send it here to the City Council.
1:56:18
The council has forty five days to decide whether or not to call the application to a vote.
1:56:22
If it makes it through the City Council successfully then we notify the applicant that it's been approved and we reach out to them to execute the revocable consent agreement, send us insurance and then the annual fee.
1:56:36
Then it comes back to us, we execute, it goes to mocks, and then it goes it's entered into FMS and goes to the comptroller.
1:56:42
For the roadway cafes, it starts off the same way with the application submission, the preliminary review.
1:56:50
We forward the application to the affected community board and city council member who have thirty days to comment, to submit comments to us.
1:57:00
We then hold the public hearing, which as I mentioned before, this public hearing is a charter requirement.
1:57:06
It requires three weeks of advertising notices in the city record as well as two newspaper ads that have to be paid for by the applicant according to the city charter.
1:57:19
But we try to overlap the public hearing notice advertising period with community board review time to try to make it as efficient as possible.
1:57:29
We hold our public hearing.
1:57:31
If everything goes well, then we approve the application, send it out for execution, comes back, goes to mocks, the comptroller.
1:57:39
And then we issue the license.