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Q&A
Council Member Farías questions agencies on street vendor data and enforcement
1:23:22
·
4 min
Council Member Amanda Farías interrogates city agency representatives about data collection on street vendors and the potential benefits of regulating unpermitted vending. She focuses on how the Department of Small Business Services (SBS) categorizes and tracks services provided to street vendors, and inquires about the impact of standardizing regulations for unpermitted vendors.
- Farías presses SBS on their ability to disaggregate data specifically related to street vendors from other small businesses.
- SBS explains their current data collection methods and limitations in identifying street vendors specifically.
- The discussion concludes with a question about whether regulating unpermitted vending would help target enforcement efforts more effectively.
Amanda Farías
1:23:22
Thank you.
1:23:22
Just two quick questions and for one for SBS, can you I'm trying to pull out I think a little bit of the data aggregation thought process or question.
1:23:32
I know you folks don't necessarily tag people that you're serving as a street vendor and so they get lumped into the larger small business tagline.
1:23:44
Can you explain maybe through the data aggregation process if there's any points where you can help define when you are serving a vendor.
1:23:56
Are you tagging people that have one or two owners or maybe not within a storefront or a mobile business?
1:24:06
Are there other ways to showcase data points that you folks are maybe serving directly to our vending community?
1:25:06
Okay so in the food category, I mean that's also restaurateurs.
1:25:11
So I guess for our data point what we're trying to better understand is when SBS, how do you define the difference in services you're getting to a vendor versus a restaurant owner?
1:25:54
think that we know, understand that component, but I guess when we are looking to you to tell us I serve 10 people a year or 10,000 people a year or 10,000 inquiries came in versus 10 inquiries came in specifically from x community, like that is what we're trying to better understand how our agencies are working to provide the supportive services.
1:26:17
So Right.
1:26:17
Just food for thought for us to continue thinking about how we're going to disseminate information while also disaggregating data to make sure we're serving the people at the right pace?
1:26:54
Yeah.
1:26:55
I mean it would probably be interesting for us as a council to also see if there is an analysis from your agency on what looks like vendor services specifically in our corridors, but I'm happy to continue talking offline about that.
1:27:08
Yeah absolutely.
1:27:08
And then just the last question that that came to thought and all or any can answer, would you all agree that regulating and setting a standard for the unpermitted vending whether that's on cart setup, food safety, street enforcement, like many of the good actors that are currently vending without a permit are doing now would help us get all the bad actors on more targeted outreach or more targeted enforcement?
Haris Khan
1:24:15
So I think just I want to make it very clear, we serve street vendors.
1:24:19
We serve storefront businesses.
1:24:20
When we're out in our neighborhood.
1:24:21
We've already done 100 plus events in this fiscal year.
1:24:24
And when we're in those communities and there's a street vendor and we're doing outreach across that corridor, we will share our street vendor resources with them.
1:24:33
I think on the particular question of if there are proxies that could help us get to what the universe of street vendors are that consume our services, I think it's very difficult.
1:24:42
I'm not sure it would be the most accurate.
1:24:45
But just for general awareness on how data gets entered, when we speak to a customer, one of those businesses that we serve, we enter into our database the industry that they're in.
1:24:55
So for street vendors, if we're talking about food vendors, that would fall under the accommodation, the food and accommodation kind of category as defined by the NAICS codes which are I think national codes that are
1:25:23
So I think businesses themselves define this type of service that they'd like to consume.
1:25:29
So when they approach us, and particularly the ones that we promote for street vendors, they are business courses, legal consultations where we can help a vendor understand whether they should be a sole proprietor or they should be in a partnership or form an LLC.
1:25:42
We can connect them to capital access resources that are available.
1:25:46
And so our services overwhelmingly are broadly accessible to the vending population and we're proud of the partnership we I
1:26:26
Right.
1:26:27
Certainly, if there's particular zip codes or corridors where there's an interest of understanding whether we have served or not, we'd be happy to do some analysis to understand the trends there.
1:26:36
And we'd be happy to serve if there's any business owner, anyone, any New Yorker that reaches out to your offices and says, I'm not sure if SPS could be the right option for us.
1:26:45
Please connect them to us.
1:26:46
We are the right option for overwhelming majority of New Yorkers that are either entrepreneurs, that are doing businesses from their homes and apartments as a result of the historic
Pierina Sanchez
1:25:06
set up.
UNKNOWN
1:25:11
Yes.
Joshua Goodman
1:27:37
I mean I think the situation that you described relies on a compromise that also includes increased enforcement, but certainly we agree that reducing regulatory burdens and providing ways for people to come into compliance leads to more productive interactions between enforcement personnel and vendors, between vendors and the communities around them.