Mamdani and Menin Blame Each Other For Delays to Fix Outdoor Dining

Mayor Mamdani and City Council Speaker Julie Menin are blaming each other for delays to reforming the broken outdoor dining program enacted by their predecessors, as nearly 1,000 eateries remain stuck in the city’s lengthy permitting pipeline.

Lawmakers are still debating how to restore year-round roadway cafés as they await an environmental review that both sides claim must be conducted before any legislation goes into effect, officials said.

Speaker Menin’s office claims that review is not expected to wrap up until the end of the summer, but the Mamdani administration and Department of Transportation have not provided a timeline for the study, as both sides continue to negotiate the details behind closed doors.

DOT, which runs the Dining Out NYC program, blames the Council’s 2023 law for the lengthy and Byzantine application process that has made it difficult for eateries to partake. Meanwhile, a representative for Menin’s office said the issues stemmed from the agency’s implementation of the existing law through its rulemaking.

The city officials need to figure it out sooner rather than later as hundreds of businesses await approval to set up al-fresco, said Andrew Rigie, the head of the New York Hospitality Alliance, which represents the restaurant and bar industry.

“Business owners want to make decisions about the future and you don’t want to wait so long that it goes into next year,” Rigie told Streetsblog. “All these restaurants that have applied, they want to operate — it’s the spring.” (And summer is less than one month away.)

Both Menin and Mamdani’s DOT Commissioner Mike Flynn are in favor of ending the winter ban on “streeteries,” even as both sides of city government follow the Big Apple’s well-established script for avoiding responsibility and moving nowhere fast.

Fewer than 1,200 restaurants currently have full approval for outdoor dining, according to public city data, and they’re mostly clustered in wealthier parts of the city.

DOT has said another 1,114 are “otherwise allowed to operate,” such as with conditional approvals. More than 900 are stuck in the approval process, including 670 that haven’t submitted all their required paperwork, according to the agency.

That nets around 2,200 restaurants legally allowed to operate outside — a mere one-10th of all the city’s eateries and bars. It’s a major drop from a peak of roughly 6,000-8,000 participants at the height of the pandemic era program when the city imposed fewer restrictions on the popular initiative.

Advocates called on the mayor and legislature to get their act together and bring back year-round dining in the street while curtailing regulations and reviews for the restaurants.

“New Yorkers don’t particularly care whose fault this is — they care that it gets fixed,” said Jackson Chabot, director of advocacy and organizing at Open Plans (which shares a parent company with Streetsblog). “This isn’t about finger-pointing between agencies or branches of government. Everyone involved says they support year-round roadway dining, so now is the time to turn that agreement into action.”

Bill, please?

The Council and DOT are discussing a 2025 bill, sponsored by Council Member Lincoln Restler (D-Brooklyn Heights), that would reinstate year-round dining, but lawmakers have yet to reintroduce a proposal for 2026.

Henry Robins, a spokesperson for Menin, said the speaker “strongly supports year-round roadway dining, and the Council is actively working with the administration to advance legislation that achieves that goal.”

However, reverting to a 12-month program requires an environmental review, according to reps from DOT and the speaker’s office – even though the city already performed such a review in 2021. But that study can’t commence until legislators and the administration agree on the bill’s exact language, both sides said.

“DOT looks forward to beginning the required environmental review to end roadway dining seasonality once legislation is finalized with the City Council,” DOT spokesman Vin Barone said in a statement. “We have been clear: the city needs to end seasonality and eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy that makes it harder for small businesses to participate. We believe the Council shares this commitment and we look forward to working with them to get these reforms done.”

Menin’s office expects the environmental review to conclude in August, allowing the Council to pass legislation in September.

“The administration has indicated it will begin the required environmental review once there is agreement on finalized bill language, and we are hopeful that process will move forward soon,” Robins said. “The Council’s goal remains moving the overall outdoor dining package expeditiously.”

Still, DOT did not provide a schedule for the environmental review, because the agency has to wait until that final bill text, so that is knows what to study — a spin on the classic Catch-22.

Other reforms to outdoor dining’s arduous permitting process could move forward outside of the environmental review.

The Council’s package of outdoor dining reforms includes a bill that would limit the required clear path for sidewalk cafés to eight feet or 50 percent of the sidewalk’s width; a second bill that would establish a dedicated office within the Department of Sanitation to respond to outdoor dining cleanliness complaints; and a third bill that would require DOT to publish outdoor dining petitions.

Restler’s bill would remove the seasonal restriction on roadway cafés and try to speed up the application process by barring community boards from requiring documentation beyond the petition and “agreed upon modifications.”

Menin has been tight-lipped about details for the revised outdoor dining program beyond removing the seasonal restriction, saying only that she wants to reduce costs for restaurants while also aiming to “address” neighborhoods where people “feel there’s over-saturation.”

Last year, Menin introduced legislation to move the program from DOT back to the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, which ran the pre-pandemic sidewalk café program. Menin served as DCWP commissioner under former Mayor Bill de Blasio.

It’s still unclear why the mayor and Council haven’t come to an agreement — or why it will take another three months to hold a vote on any changes. That lack of transparency threatens to erode the efficacy of reforms to outdoor dining by repeating the mistakes of the original 2023 legislation.

In the lead-up to the previous outdoor dining bill, then-Speaker Adrienne Adams also revealed few details, while opining that outdoor dining shouldn’t be in the roadway — only to later hedge that she would try to strike the “right balance.”

After Streetsblog uncovered the backroom deal that Adams and her colleagues struck to curtail roadway dining during the winter months — seemingly to secure votes from lawmakers who disliked the pandemic program — it became clear that the resulting legislation would severely compromise the permanent iteration of outdoor dining. Politicians and advocates have been trying to remedy that mistake ever since.

The long and winding road to approval

The current outdoor dining regulations, which date back to the 2023 law, replaced the pandemic-era emergency program that had essentially let restaurants set up on the sidewalk and in the street for free with only a DOT sign-off.

The new rules added extensive public input outside of DOT from local community boards, Council members, and in some cases a public hearing. All roadway dining applications require a public hearing, while sidewalk setups only have to do so if the local community board recommends denying the application.

The rules also imposed a schedule of payments and other costs for businesses. Business need separate licenses to operate a roadway vs. sidewalk café, which cost $1,050 each and are valid for four years. There’s also a $2,500 refundable security deposit for curbside set-ups, or $1,500 for seats on the foot path. Business owners must also pay to advertise a notice for a public hearing in a newspaper, which DOT says ranges from $100 to $800.

It takes time, money and no small amount of mental fortitude to prepare for and attend these hearings, where attendees routinely harass, intimidate and verbally abuse applicants.

But the single largest expense comes from the very nature of the newer rules’ abbreviated outdoor dining season. Setting up an outdoor dining shed, and then tearing it back down during the winter months and storing or disposing it, constitutes the biggest ongoing cost that restauranteurs face in setting up outdoor dining at their establishments, often costing them tens of thousands of dollars.

DOT says the outdoor dining application process takes around six months, but has acknowledged that it can stretch out to nine months “or longer,” with DOT Commissioner Flynn blaming “layers of reviews” that the Council enacted.

Some community boards and Council members represent areas, like the West Village and the Lower East Side, where residents complained about the pandemic-era program. In certain cases, car-friendly boards have leveraged their new power to grill outdoor dining applicants at hours-long hearings. Some boards asked for notarized plans by a professional architect, and pressured applicants to shrink their proposal, under the threat of denying applications and triggering more hearings.

After the public reviews, restaurant owners agree to pay annual revocable consent fees aka rent — pegged to the square footage and the area in the city, with popular neighborhoods commanding higher rates. Those rates range from $720 a year for a 120-square-foot sidewalk café in eastern Queens to $7,720 for a 160-square-foot roadway setup in the West Village.

Once they sign that agreement for those charges with the city, the final step is the city comptroller registering the application, which can take up to 30 days. Comptroller Mark Levine recently launched a probe into DOT’s process to find out why more than 900 applications are still in a bureaucratic holding pattern.

Immediate tweaks proposed

Rigie said DOT should allow restaurants to operate immediately if they’ve filed all their application paperwork and had their public hearings, but are still awaiting full approval. He noted that this would mirror the practice of the State Liquor Authority, which offers temporary operating permits.

The agency could also allow for payment schedules so businesses don’t have to pay all the costs for the four-year license and revocable consents in a lump sum.

“Not even a small business’s landlord requires a year’s rent upfront,” Rigie said.

DOT offers temporary approvals while awaiting the final step of the comptroller’s sign-off, but the agency has grown wary of allowing businesses set out tables and chairs before they sign the full revocable consent agreement and pay up — because some applicants bailed on finishing their paperwork under a previous conditional approval program, a senior agency official noted last year.

“As you can imagine, once a restaurant is authorized to operate, they may not be so motivated to move quickly to pay money to the city,” DOT’s Associate Deputy Commissioner for Cityscape and Franchises Michelle Craven said at a November Council oversight hearing.

Both the public hearing and the revocable consent requirements are enshrined in the City Charter, so removing either would require a city-wide ballot referendum, Barone said.

DOT would support a referendum on the hearing regulations, he added.

Chabot of Open Plans said the Council could expedite the current process by allowing community boards and the Council to provide feedback over the same timeframe, rather than making restaurants wait a month or more for the first review and another month-and-a-half for the second.

He added that restaurants should also be allowed to use harder materials to weatherproof their structures and keep them useful for patrons in the rain and over the winter.

“We should be focused on improving and expanding what works — including year-round roadway cafés, better curbside design, and streamlined approvals,” Chabot said. “The Council, DOT, and the administration all have a role to play, and now is the time to work together to deliver a year-round outdoor dining program that works for restaurants, communities, and our public space.”