Community Update

TO THE CANDIDATES RUNNING IN THE 35th CD
People run for office to gain the power to right wrongs. All of you contending for the seat in the 35th City Council District have aired concerns about dead end jobs, low wages, small businesses, unfair regulations, government waste and the cosiness between electeds and developers --and the property poaching that results. Voters have been betrayed on these issues and are looking to send a candidate flying the WE THE PEOPLE banner to City Hall.

For a number of people in Fort Greene/Clinton Hill who gets our vote may well depend on who's interested in taking a new look at Business Improvement Districts (BIDs).

What's wrong with BIDs? First, they're undemocratic. On purpose. Landlords and City officials draw the boundaries around a targeted area into a BID and then put it to a landlords-only vote. The landlords win! They get their BID! Often tenants have no idea what's happened and find out only when the bill arrives. That's after the City Council makes the BID the law: Tenant stores are now on the hook for "services" they didn't ask for and don't want but have to "buy" because a BID is a pay-to-stay. If an owner refuses, the City shuts him down.

When times were tough along Fulton in the 1970s, 80s and 90s and merchants were begging for help, the City turned a deaf ear. Then it tore the street apart, sidewalks, too, in a 28-month siege. Some stores didn't survive and those who did incurred tremendous losses. When DOT finally paved everything back together and real estate began to boom is when FAB, the Fulton Street BID, made its entry. In three and a half years almost 50 stores, almost every one minority-owned, have closed: Joloff, Kulcha Lion, The Empress Club, Senegalese Fashion Center, F&S Tire, Bargain R Us, Mariam's, Jacob's Eye, Michael Allen, Sister's Hardware, Balloon Corner, Brown Betty, Cakeman Raven, two t-shirt stores, braiding salon, dry cleaner, etc., etc., gone. Gentrification was coming -- FAB stepped on the gas.

We all would be happy if shops were free to join a BID if they wanted. Not only are stores forced to "belong," as "members" they have little or no say over what the Board does with their money. FAB, for example, chooses to spend lavishly on street entertainments and to pinch pennies on its African street sweepers who work long and hard in all manner of weather for $7.50/hour ($0.00/lunch hour.) Other BIDs contract for similarly low wages. The Council inveighs against private companies who pay less than $10/hour yet routinely approves worker exploitation by BIDs.

WHAT'S REALLY WRONG WITH BIDs IS THE CITY COUNCIL. Their legislation is a love letter to landlords, written so a BID, even if amok, is practically impossible to dissolve. Another interesting fact: If a BID wants to reign forever, all it has to do is run up debt. A BID can NOT be removed if it owes. That's the LAW!

We believe the next Council should rewrite the legislation to be open and fair. To be democratic. As BIDs are squeezed into every City cranny they're being morphed out of context. FAB includes a monster international corporation that has nothing to do with Fulton Street -- otherwise a string of small one-offs -- and the BID in the offing in Prospect Heights to benefit Forest City Ratner at the expense of tiny tenant shops is even more grotesque.

Most of you were in grade school when the first BID was passed in 1982. The BID bill stays the same when everything else in the City has changed and changed and changed around it. Which of you candidates will rewrite the BID legislation to bring it into the 21st century?