It rarely happens that someone puts himself in the head to open a small corner in the city where to prepare the egg cream, the New York drink that, despite the name, contains neither eggs nor cream but milk, syrup and seltz water. To prepare ice creams, however, it soon turns out that the normal restaurant permit is not enough. A New York food exercise generally pays $280 a year for the Food Service Establishment Permit, but to use a machine and produce frozen desserts must also get a Frozen Dessert Manufacturer Permit, which costs up to $25 and must be renewed together with the first. The figure is modest: the problem is having to submit a second question for an activity already carried out in a room subject to the health checks provided for all other foods.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani has chosen this permit as an example of the complicated relationship between the municipality and small businesses. On 20 July he presented OPEN for Small Business, a plan that collects more than fifty licenses, fines, inspections and administrative procedures. OPEN stands for Overhauling Procedures and Expanding Navigation, more or less “review procedures and facilitate orientation”. The plan was prepared after meetings with category associations and a consultation of over five hundred entrepreneurs in the five boroughs.
According to the report published by the Municipality, in New York there are about 180 thousand companies with no more than fifty employees. They employ a million people, about a quarter of the private sector workers. In meetings organized by the administration, the owners spoke less than the cost of individual licenses and more than the time lost to understand which office to address, coordinate different agencies and get answers on the status of a practice.
The potentially most important part of OPEN therefore concerns assistance, more than the abolition of permits. With an executive order already signed by Mamdani, the city program NYC BEST will have to assign to the activities that follows a manager in charge of accompanying them from the opening to the first inspections. You will have to explain what licenses you need, coordinate appointments with different agencies and report errors that can slow down a question. The program will also offer meetings on compliance before inspections and assistance to resolve fines and disputes without necessarily reaching an administrative hearing.
From October 1st, inspectors from eight municipal departments will also have to deliver an updated copy of the Business Owner Bill of Rights: a document explaining how the inspection should take place, what information should be provided and how to file a complaint. The document already existed, but in a 2025 survey only 9 percent of entrepreneurs said they had received it. The judgements left by the holders after the checks will also be taken into account in the assessments of the inspectors.
Half of the sectoral interventions include restaurants, bodegas, supermarkets and street vendors. The Municipality wants to authorize more locations to organize the mandatory course on food safety, hire new inspectors to reduce the wait of restaurants looking to recover an A rating and lower from 70 to 20 dollars the permit to sell food during trade fairs and temporary events. For some irregularities of bodegas, such as the absence of a price tag, a period will be introduced in which to correct the problem and avoid the fine.
The plan also intervenes on the outdoor table program, one of the themes mentioned most often by the restaurants consulted. The administration has eliminated the passage to the mayor’s office for the dehors on the sidewalks and would like to do the same for those on the road, which however require a change of rules. The Department of Health also intends to increase the number of successive inspections for premises with a B or a C: today a restaurant may have already corrected the problems but continue to show for months an evaluation that no longer describes its conditions.
Mamdani presented the measures using the type of jokes he had already employed during the election campaign. He described the rules for barbers as “anti-fade” and said that his administration is “in the pockets of Big Abuela”, referring to the reform of bingo. But beyond jokes, the problem is serious.
A barber who owns his own store must have two state licenses and a municipal permit; OPEN would also bring the renewal of the latter from one to three years. For bingo, New York City currently imposes $250 maximum prizes for a single game and $1,000 per session, much less than the state limits of $5,000 and $15,000. The municipality wants to eliminate the local roofs, leaving the state in force. Licences can be obtained primarily from non-profit organizations that use matches to finance religious, educational, health or charity activities.
OPEN, however, is a very different set of measures, not a reform already approved in all its part. Some changes can be introduced directly by the mayor or municipal agencies. To abolish frozen desserts and simplify barber licenses, the New York State cooperates. The revision of the law that establishes where to expose prices in shops must pass from the City Council, while changes to the tables on the carriages depend on a law still under discussion. The real scope of the plan will therefore be understood from the times of implementation, which for now are not equal nor always indicated.
To abolish a $25 permit will not change the accounts of the Brooklyn Farmacy alone. Commercial rentals, insurances, bills, labor costs and debts accumulated during the pandemic have much greater consequences, and Mamdani’s executive order recognizes that an activity can comply with all the rules and continue to fail to bear its own costs. The leave of ice creams is a small demonstration of how bureaucracies are formed: every fulfillment taken by itself seems negligible, but their sum takes up the time of those who should manage the premises.
L’articolo In New York we need two permits to prepare an ice cream proviene da IlNewyorkese.
