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Health & Fitness

BROOKLYN CHAMBER HUSTLES SMALL BUSINESSES

     On October 8, 2013 the Brooklyn Daily Eagle ran a story about the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce going on the road to hustle for BIDs in Dyker Heights and Park Slope.  
     I wrote a comment to the paper the next day that stayed up for about an hour.  Today I attempted to repost and couldn't for reasons unknown to editors there.  A tech advisor said if I sent it to him, he would enter it as a Letter to the Editor.  I did and he did, and the letter went up and disappeared in a hour.  Eagle editors can't explain why.  
     It's curious to have my words disappear at the Eagle  even as they have at Patch.  My blog, "Who Knew Ingenue?" went missing the night I entered it and remained "lost" for ten days.
     Since the Eagle can't seem to keep the response to its story on its own screen where it belongs, let's see if it goes up and stays up in StreetTalk:

     The Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce is a large, powerful organization in the thickest of the thick of the Downtown Brooklyn development boom.  Its interest in small goings-on in the far reaches of the borough is less familiar.  
     Aren't BIDs supposed to be self-evidencing and so site-specific that a BID's designers would be the merchants themselves?  If merchants want to form a BID, the Department of Small Business Services exists to expedite and handhold through the various stages of BID creation.  The Chamber of Commerce is extraneous to the process; likely the Chamber's purpose here is to add a new layer of political fat to the racket BIDs have become.
     For sure there's merit in the idea of a BID.  And like most ideas, the devil is in the details.  When a BID is honestly conceived; when everyone - especially the non-voting tenants who have to pay the BID tax - knows how the BID will change their lives; when the sponsoring organization is true; and board and manager open and alive, a BID can be a good thing.  When a BID hides behind its own complexity and board and manager are exclusion-ary and operate in secret, the problems are many.
     The Fulton Street BID - FAB - is an example of a BID amok.  Most of the merchants had no idea it existed until they got the tax.  FAB promised extra security and sanitation.  There has been no security (there have been a number of daytime holdups) and sanitation is performed by grotesquely underpaid sweepers.  The City still tickets the stores for litter.
     In the six years FAB has been around, some 60 stores have gone out of business.  Almost without exception, these stores were owned by minorities, mostly immigrants from the Caribbean, Africa and the Middle East.  Almost without exception, their little shops have been replaced by fancy bars, cafes and restaurants.  Fulton Street might as well be in TriBeCa.  Actually, TriBeCa has come here:  Tribeca Pediatrics for the children of the patrons of the new bars and restaurants.
     FAB is a bad BID, an isolated, shadowy entity with the chops to shut down any store that refuses to pay its tab.  FAB has sliced the neighborhood on class lines, merchants and residents alike. Worst of all it has taken our voice.  We don't have one anymore.  City agencies use FAB for automatic "community approves" checkoffs for (expensive, non-essential) projects the community knows little or nothing about.  That's the real purpose of this BID.
     Our advice to the good small businessfolk of Dyker Heights and Park Slope is do your own homework, your own footwork, your own outreach.  You know better than the Chamber who you are, what you do, what you have (and what you have to lose), what you can afford, what you need and what you want.  Keep your own counsel.  Keep your neighborhood.  Keep your voice.
     
     

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