Comptroller Stringer Pens Open Letter to Small Businesses Amid COVID-19 Pandemic: What Small Businesses Need Now From Our Government

(New York, NY) — Today, Comptroller Stringer issued an open letter to New York City’s small business community on what City, State, and Federal governments must do to help small businesses survive, recover, and rebuild in the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The text of the letter is below. To read Comptroller Stringer’s letter on Medium, click here.

To Our Small Business Community:

Our city is battling an unprecedented public health emergency, the likes of which we haven’t seen for over a century.

As we come together to stop the spread of COVID-19, the massive economic fallout on the horizon may rival the losses we sustained during the Great Recession and even the Great Depression. Our hotels, bars, restaurants, gyms, stores, and many other businesses are closing. The food and drink, hotel, and retail sectors alone employ over 700,000 workers; as thousands of these businesses struggle to stay afloat, it is no exaggeration to say that hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers face losing their livelihoods. Many businesses and non-profits have already had to lay off valued employees.

We need to act now to protect our workers and our economy. I urge the City to immediately take the following steps to provide urgent relief to our small businesses:

• Suspend all collections of outstanding small business fines for six months;
• Automatically renew all licenses and permits (liquor licenses, sidewalk café licenses, Health department permits, etc.) without payment of fees, for the next 3 months;
• Suspend payment of the Commercial Rent Tax for 2 months for ground-floor retail businesses with demonstrated business losses; 
• Expand the New York City Department of Small Business Service’s (SBS) no-interest loan program to include any business of up to 100 employees that has experienced a significant quarterly decline in revenue, and increase the maximum loan amount to $150,000; 
• Enact immediate legislation capping delivery platform fees at 10 percent. Deferring fees, as GrubHub and others are doing, is simply not good enough, and is taking advantage of businesses that are already struggling to just survive;
• And in addition, New York State should consider a limited sales taxes holiday for all restaurants, hotels, and street-level retail stores.

Once the public health is stabilized and businesses are allowed to re-open, the State and City should join to create a “Re-Start” loan and grant program to help small independent businesses that have closed temporarily to re-open their doors, re-hire their workers, and welcome back their customers.

These measures would cost the City and the State millions of dollars in lost revenue, on top of the projected lost sales, income and other tax revenues caused by the current crisis — at least $3 billion in the next six months, according to our estimate — and likely more as long as we are still fighting to contain this pandemic.

But we have no choice. City and State governments are the front line of the response; we see up close what our residents and businesses need, and are best positioned to respond with meaningful help immediately. But we also can’t do this alone.

That’s why the federal government must also act swiftly to provide relief to state and local governments. The House of Representatives has passed legislation to require the federal government to pick up a greater share of the cost of Medicaid — and that needs to be expanded even further. Furthermore, Congress should pass a Fiscal Stabilization Fund like that enacted in President Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill, to provide additional funding for a broad range of public services including education, childcare, housing and transit to State and local governments that suffer substantial tax revenue losses. The Congress’ stimulus plan must also include ways to quickly get cash into the hands of businesses and stabilize their finances; we need more small business loans and more loan guarantees for bank lending for small and mid-sized enterprises.

I strongly support the proposal to provide direct cash payments to individuals — and we should consider doing similar relief for small businesses in critically affected sectors like tourism and hospitality, entertainment and culture. Non-profit cultural organizations should also be included in the federal stimulus package; in New York City alone, over 2,000 non-profit arts and cultural organizations contribute nearly $11 billion in economic activity annually — and almost all of them operate on the thinnest of margins.

Local government is on the leading edge of service delivery every day — and now more than ever. We can respond to the immediate needs — but we will ultimately need the resources that only the federal government can muster to do so without facing dire cutbacks in services down the road.

Our small businesses, our arts community and our cultural organizations are core to our economy and our identity as a city. Our workforce is the best in the world. I urge all levels of government to act now to make sure that we can recover and rebuild — stronger than ever before.

Scott M. Stringer
New York City Comptroller

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