Enforcement of street vending will soon be handled by the city’s sanitation department, city officials confirmed on Friday.
The responsibility for enforcing vendor rules currently belongs to the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. That will change on April 1, when sanitation is set to take over, a spokesperson for the department confirmed.
But the move, which was first reported by the Daily News on Friday afternoon, has already drawn skepticism.
“We are disappointed to see that once again, our city is fast to move on creating more enforcement for street vendors — yet fails to reform the unjust and arcane regulatory system, and provide opportunities for our city’s smallest businesses to thrive,” the Street Vendor Project, an influential advocacy group, said in a statement on Friday.
The enforcement of where and when street vendors ply their trade has been a source of conflict in New York City for years. The city moved enforcement out of the hands of the NYPD under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, after vendors — who are mostly immigrants — and advocates complained they were being criminalized for earning a living.
But even after the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection took over, the NYPD still had the power to issue tickets and the vendors said they still faced harassment at the hands of city authorities.
The news came two days after the City Council held a preliminary budget hearing for the sanitation department. Councilmembers Sandy Nurse and Shahana Hanif, the sanitation chair and immigration chair respectively, called the timing “a missed opportunity to have meaningfully engaged in dialogue to better understand the scope of this change” in a joint statement on Tuesday, and expressed concern over the lack of information about the change.
“The Department of Sanitation’s mission is street cleanliness, not enforcing vendor licenses,” the joint statement read.
Both councilmembers added that they “struggle to understand” how the sanitation department will be able to pull off the move, given that it already struggles to enforce street cleanliness, and enforcement positions account for a large portion of vacancy cuts in the preliminary budget.
In a statement, Mayor Eric Adams said that street vendors are vital to the city, but that "unregulated street vending is a quality-of-life concern that affects the health, safety, accessibility, prosperity, and cleanliness of our streets, sidewalks, and neighborhoods.”
He added that with the sanitation department’s involvement, “New Yorkers will enjoy improved quality of life, more accessible and cleaner streets, and a more welcoming city across all five boroughs."
