Council Member Morano questions Khan on Staten Island commercial lease assistance uptake

Thank you.

I would like to recognize that we have been joined by Councilmember Salam, and I do know we have a couple of hearings.

So in that, I will let Councilmember Marano ask his questions.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Mr.

Kahn, for your testimony.

And thank you both for making an effort to visit the small businesses in my district.

It is great to have both a chair of this committee and a SBS commissioner and his chief of staff that

actually takes the time to visit and listen to small businesses themselves rather than think that's what reflected on reports and statistics is actually what small businesses are saying.

And obviously, I'm going to ask first about how this affects Staten Island small businesses.

I want to begin on the commercial lease assistance aspect of things.

I want to start with the number that jumped out at me in the committee report.

In fiscal year 2024, the city's commercial lease assistance program

Helped 685 businesses.

Of those, 252 were in Manhattan, 217 were in Brooklyn, and just 13 were on Staten Island.

13.

That's fewer than 2% of all the businesses served.

Now, I'm certainly not suggesting the city should distribute services based on borough population alone, but I want to know whether the need is being met.

How many Staten Island businesses applied for assistance?

How many were turned away?

And how many were actually made aware that this program exists?

If you don't have those numbers, I'm wondering if you can provide them to the committee relatively soon, if not today, in the next day or two.

Thank you, Council Member.

So on the commercial lease assistance program, no one is turned away if they want to start a new lease, renew a lease, or have landlord-tenant related disputes that do not rise to litigation.

And so any business in Staten Island that reaches that, we would want to serve all of them.

We would want to meet all of them.

Nothing in our program.

There is no backlog in the program.

There's no waiting list people get put on.

There's some eligibility requirements to ensure they're not, and we can correct this if I'm wrong, but my understanding is they can't make over.

Couple million dollars every year in revenue, but if it's a small business, generally the ones that we visited together, all of them would be eligible to benefit from that service.

And it's one of the key programs we promote to all of our outreach work.

This year, we've already reached 15,000 business

throughout the city, it's thousands of businesses in Staten Island as well.

And it does relate somewhat to borough proportions.

So Brooklyn and Manhattan have a tremendously high number of businesses, raw number of storefront businesses.

That number decreases in other boroughs and that impacts uptake.

Certainly doesn't impact our commitment to visit every business door to door, promote the programs, and then see if they're open to accessing the service.

It also reflects to the issue of

They may not want to engage in that service if things are going well.

And so that's another thing to consider.