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City fattens coffers with frivolous slaps at local businesses

By KATE BRIQUELET Last Updated: 6:02 AM, September 30, 2012 Posted: 2:51 AM, September 30, 2012

Its a fine mess. The city continues to blitz merchants with ridiculous fines raking in cash for scuffed cutting boards, too-short napkins and failure to recognize the medicinal properties of ChapStick. Its not about protecting the consumer or the food. This is a money racket for the city, said Declan Morrison, owner of Blackwater Inn in Forest Hills, Queens. A Health Department inspector recently spent several hours looking for ticket-worthy violations, before spotting five thermometers in the pubs refrigerator. The inspector said, This is way too many thermometers, and docked me points, said Morrison, who also owns the nearby Tap House.

Leon Kogut

But on paper, the offense read, Accurate thermometer not provided, a fine of $300. The charge was later dropped, but Morrison said he has forked over about $20,000 in fines in the past year. Fines against small businesses are skyrocketing. The cash-strapped city sucked in $820 million last year compared to $741 million in 2007 and $485 million a decade ago. Andy Koutsoudakis, owner of the Gee Whiz Diner in TriBeCa, says he was hit with a $300 fine because his napkins were shorter than the knives on top of them. Supposedly the knife is touching the table, he said.Is this a surgery room? Koutsoudakis said merchants feel terrorized.

Were afraid to even speak. When they come in, its like drug raids, he said. Leslie Barnes, owner of London Lennies in Queens, said he was fined $300 for having too many marks on his cutting boards. Now he spends $2,000 on backup boards each year. Consumer Affairs Department inspectors charged a Ditmas Park barber $650 this year for using an antique register that didnt print receipts and for posting different prices for mens and womens haircuts. The city treats small-business owners like their own ATM, said Leon Kogut of Leons Fantasy Cuts. You can always find something to fine. Kings Court Drugs of Ditmas Park got a $250 fine for charging a 14-cent tax on medicated lip balm. City officials say ChapStick with SPF is supposed to be exempt.Betty Cooney, executive director of the Graham Avenue BID in Williamsburg, said one African immigrant abandoned his small junk shop this summer after city fines became too much. The last straw was a $100 ticket from the Sanitation Department for throwing a piece of paper into a city trash can on the corner after a passerby dropped it in front of his door. The inspector accused him of using the receptacle for commercial use. It was just wrong. If he left it on the sidewalk, they would have ticketed him too, Cooney said. They would have ticketed him no matter what hed done. In July, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio sued the city to obtain data on fine revenues across all city agencies. He said he will release his findings within the next month and reveal which neighborhoods are being crushed the most and for what frivolous violations. Very minor technicalities suddenly became cash cows, de Blasio told The Post, adding that the fine frenzy seems to be an outer-borough phenomenon. No receipts from antique register Leons Fantasy Cuts, Brooklyn Fine: $650 My cash register doesnt hurt anybody. Nobody asks for receipts in barber shops nobody! said Leon Kogut. Too many thermometers Blackwater Inn, Queens Fine: $300 Every time they come its something stupid. Howcan too many thermometers hurt people? said Declan Morrison. Cut marks on cutting boards London Lennies, Queens Fine: $300 Theres nothing cheap coming from the Health Department today, said Leslie

Barnes. Nowwe change the boards frequently, even if theyre hardly marked. kbriquelet@nypost.com ____________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________
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Food vendors slow burn

Fined 1G fumbling for permit
By SALLY GOLDENBERG Last Updated: 4:11 AM, October 1, 2012 Posted: 1:46 AM, October 1, 2012

Time really is money especially when it comes to the city Department of Healths ticket blitz on merchants. A health inspector slapped halal cart vendor Ahmed Hassan with a $1,000 fine because it took him too long two minutes to find his permit while he was cooking, he told The Post. Now the Queens man, who has a young son, fears he could lose his permit and his livelihood. Its too much! I cant afford it, he said. I cant pay a ticket for $1,000. I have a lot of bills. I never heard somebody get a $1,000 ticket. Hes fighting the city to get the violation tossed.

MAKE IT QUICK! Ahmed Hassan took too long two minutes to show his permit to a city health inspector.

Hassan was prepping for the lunch rush on the corner of Duane Street and Broadway on April 18 when the inspector asked for his permit. Hassan, whipping up lamb and chicken, told the inspector it was in the cart. But the official left after two minutes, returning hours later with the ticket for the maximum fine although Hassan, 40, was holding his city permit at that point, the

vendor said. The violation says Hassan was preparing food without a permit or prior inspection report on hand. Office had to be contacted in order to obtain permit information, it says. The inspector skipped four fine options, from $25 to $250, and wrote in the top choice of $1,000. Hassan unsuccessfully challenged the ticket in May with the citys Environmental Control Board and is preparing an appeal with an attorney from the Street Vendor Project, an advocacy group lobbying City Council to lower maximum fines for vendors. The next hearing has not been scheduled. Hassans attorney, Matthew Shapiro, said the cart was displaying a decal indicating it was a valid city vending operation when the inspector arrived. This is a clear example of an excessive and arbitrary fine designed to punish smallbusiness owners who do not make enough income to afford this type of penalty, Shapiro said. The Bloomberg administration has so far received $378,446 from food-cart vendor fines this year, compared with more than $1.1 million last year and nearly $1.7 million in 2010. The number of tickets issued is at 12,702 this year, compared with 18,641 last year. In 2010, it was a record-high 20,224. sgoldenberg@nypost.com ____________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________ ____________________ ____________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________ ____________________ http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/ beaten_to_gulp_udQJp2Xt5jatqsRE0HXsGK

Beaten to a gulp
Blame government, not 7-Eleven, for killing off the bodega
by KYLE SMITH Last Updated: 8:44 AM, September 30, 2012 Posted: 12:37 AM, September 30, 2012

Kyle Smith
The Big Gulps are coming, and the bodegas are going. At New York Citys mini-grocery stores called bodegas, best known for their stocks of malt liquor and ATMS that charge you five bucks, all the talk is about the looming menace of 7-Eleven stores. Remember when Pathmark, CVS and Starbucks destroyed the city by opening up stores here? Its all happening again. 7-Eleven now runs more than 100 outlets in the five boroughs, with a dozen more coming this year. Even Manhattan, whose first 7-Eleven opened three years ago, is now home to about 20 of them, with 100 or so more coming in the next five years.

Locally owned businesses decry national chains stealing their customers. But they should look closer to home at their locally owned government. New York state offers the nations worst tax climate for small businesses, and the city makes the situation worse. In the Bloomberg years, massive increases in cigarette taxes and anti-smoking laws have cut into one of the bodegas most reliable profit centers. The law banning big sodas has already gone into effect in bodegas but it doesnt affect 7-Eleven because as an operator of convenience stores rather than bodegas, the chain is regulated by the state, not the city. State law is so far silent on the issue of how large your soda should be. Bodega owner Ramon Murphy, the president of the Bodega Association of the United States, pleaded with the state Senate in 2010 against a proposed soda tax, which for the moment has been dropped, saying beverages were 25% of his sales. The bodega saga is a classic case of government giving you a back rub with one hand and punching you in the face with the other. Oozing sympathy for small businesses (actually for large and powerful unions), the city has successfully kept Walmart out of the five boroughs. Great. Except a bodega on Avenue D this year was hit with a $6,000 fine and made to undertake $37,500 worth of renovations after somebody noticed that the space was zoned for a garage back in 1940. Current owner Bernard Margalit pointed out that the space had been operating as a store since the 1980s, to no avail. Which is the greater threat? Walmart and 7-Eleven, or the nearly $900 million in fines

and fees the city shakes down small businesses for annually? On Grand Street in Brooklyn in 2010, a bodega was fined $40,000 in building-code violations because, on two advertisements it displayed promoting TV programs, the following words appeared in small print: Free posters, while supplies last Enter here to win great prizes. Some sort of outdoor-advertising rule was broken. The bodega lawyered up and fought the fine in court for two years, then lost anyway. In a fit of hysteria driven by media reporters about crazed teenagers on Four Loko, the senator from Brooklyn, Charles Schumer, two years ago rammed through an FDA regulation that banned alcoholic caffeine drinks. That killed another profit source in bodegaland, though the combination remains legal when you call it Irish coffee. Bodegas longstanding black-market practice of selling single cigarettes as loosies thats right, its illegal to sell one C-stick but legal to sell 20 will now earn you a city fine of as much as $1,000. Stores like 7-Eleven enjoy cost savings and other economies of scale that make it possible for them to undersell local retailers. But government, while loudly proclaiming its love for the little guy, keeps coming up with more regulations that increase the advantages of being larger. Who is going to be more able to survive this fine-apalooza a deep-pocketed nationwide chain or mom and pop? Forty grand is nothing to 7-Eleven. In a recent survey by the Bodega Association of New York City, 61% of owners said they faced a risk of going out of business soon and only 24% said they would advise others to start a small business in the city. Seventy-one percent said city officials didnt understand how their business operates. Last year the owner of Eden Farm, a well-liked East Village bodega, reported he had endured his worst summer ever and predicted hed soon go under. And to all of this, the city responds with more and more ridiculous interference. Now its pushing the New York City Healthy Bodegas Initiative, a friendly-sounding document that gently tries to steer bodega owners to selling healthier fare. Todays nudge has a way of becoming tomorrows law. Needless to say, this pressure isnt being applied to state-regulated 7-Eleven. Not that itll work anyway, even if 1% milk becomes something bodegas are required by law to sell. Its been four years since Bloomberg ordered restaurants to post calorie counts. Did New Yorkers stop being fat? Kyle.Smith@nypost.com