Chair Menin Questions DOT on Pending Applications and Walk-In Licensing Centers

So we have a number that we're in active discussions with or are non-responsive.

And so what we found, and Michelle can explain this a little bit further, is that as we as we talked about earlier, some of the restaurants and the hospitality lines mentioned, a lot of the restaurants, because we did not require an architect or an engineer to prepare their drawings, we got some quite substandard drawings.

So what we've had to do in those cases is go back and forth with the restaurant.

And what we quickly learned is that the restaurants, they're very busy, they're running a business, or they don't have the expertise.

What we have done rather than tell them your measurements are wrong, your sidewalk distances are totally incorrect.

What we have done is we have corrected those errors for them, sent it back to them, asked them to review, and then we're keeping their application moving.

Of the ones that we're waiting to approve now, what we're seeing is some of them are not responding to us, or some of them may choose to withdraw, but they're not telling us they don't want to participate in the program.

So we are and we're doing everything we can to get to them.

We've offered to come out to their restaurant, we've offered a Zoom call to go through the plans.

Um they can come to us.

We're we're open to any of those things that the restaurants mentioned earlier, but we can't necessarily force every restaurant to engage with us if they're not using.

Why wouldn't you set up a walk-in licensing center in every single borough to make it easy for restaurants to walk in, get their paperwork processed, and get their questions answered?

Chair, I'd rather even make it easier.

We'll go to the restaurant.

We have gone to restaurants and we've offered restaurants to come to them.

What we've heard from most of them is they're super busy, so they actually prefer the Zoom option, the remote option, where we call up the plan on the screen, they're in the restaurant, we're in the office, and we do that together.

We change the plan, fix it, and move along.

That it that sounds great.

It's just not what we're hearing in the field.

It totally contradicts uh complaints that I'm getting to my office that I know that my colleagues are getting that the hospitality alliance is getting where people feel that it's stuck in bureaucratic red tape and that they're not hearing back from DOT.

So there seems to be a total disconnect between what you're saying and what we're hearing from restaurants and the hospitality alliance.

Okay, well, actually, the folks who were here before us, a lot of them indicated an excellent response out of DOT, and we are returning all the calls within a day or so.