NYC small businesses face challenging future: City Comptroller
NYC small businesses fight for survival amid pandemic and the City Comptroller, Scott Stringer, tells Yahoo Finance that they've only received 12% of federal PPP loans.
Video Transcript
JULIE HYMAN: What's the status in New York City? I mean, you and I know well, not just in New York City, but across the country, schools are short of resources in the best of times. Are New York City schools-- do they have what they need to reopen?
SCOTT STRINGER: Look, we need to have a stimulus package that is also going to include money for school reopenings. This is not a cheap undertaking. This is really a matter of putting dollars to work so that we can create a school plan that works for kids, whether it's remote learning, in-classroom learning. This is the challenge of every big city and every small county in America right now, and Trump has to stop playing games and come forth with a stimulus that reflects what we actually need to get our kids educated in a safe way, looking at science and medicine, not hokey pokey stuff coming out of Washington.
ADAM SHAPIRO: Scott, got to address, though, a lot of us love this city dramatically. And I'm going to be self-centered about New York, but other cities face these funding issues. The mayor is threatening to lay off 22,000 people. We have millionaires and billionaires who pay a great deal in taxes moving. The governor begging for them to come back and stay. Don't we need to address our tax code in this city and how we go forward? Because small business is getting pushed out. We all know the complaints.
SCOTT STRINGER: Well, look, there's-- you know, we have to walk and chew gum at the same time. You know, de Blasio's view of this city is much different than mine. I do think we have to have a real small business plan. We have to make sure that more small businesses are able to access PPP money, and only 12% of that money actually came to our city. We also have to have a strategy to keep businesses going, and that requires moving some of our small businesses online and using city resources to do that.
The mayor has no small business plan, and it-- it's reflected in the fact that we were in trouble as it-- as it related to retail before the pandemic. So yes, you're right, we have to look at our tax base. We have to look at how we manage the city going forward. But that doesn't take away from the fact that the big cure right now for education and for a lot of our serious needs right now has to do with a stimulus package.
That doesn't mean we, in government, stop working in New York City. I think we should be doubling down. We've got to save Main Street. I actually think Wall Street is going to do just fine in this situation, spend a lot of time thinking about it. But at the end of the day, those mom and pop stores are the lifeblood of New York City. It's our employment epicenter, and it's what makes us different than almost every major city in the world.
RICK NEWMAN: Scott, Rick Newman here. I just wonder if you can go a little further about that. I mean, restaurants and other businesses in the city, some of them are already closing. And you have to scratch your head and wonder, how can restaurants that have single digit profit margins survive at 50% capacity and so on? What-- so aside from stimulus, a bailout from Washington, what can the city do to keep some of those businesses going?
SCOTT STRINGER: Well, we have to rearrange how we treat our small businesses. Pre-pandemic, the city government did everything it could to close our businesses before they even got a chance to succeed, the bureaucracy, the red tape. Inspectors would come in at the busiest times and issue fines and fees and just harass every business owner, every entrepreneur. We should have a moratorium on fines and fees. We should finally cut the bureaucracy at the Department of Buildings.
Do you know there's something called an expediter that restaurants and small businesses have to pay simply to navigate a city agency, a public agency? And they make money at the expense of these local store owners. And the city administration has done everything in its power to lay on more and more harassment, and then they started to realize, oh, now we're in a pandemic. We need these restaurants to come back to life. We have got to create a plan for them, and we cannot keep hurting them as it relates to the bureaucracy.
DAN HOWLEY: Scott, I want to ask you now. So we have-- we talk about how the-- the city is, you know, the bureaucracy is hurting small businesses, and we talk about how small businesses are hurting as a result of the pandemic. But, you know, we do have some PPE money, and I continue to see some of these shops continuing to close down. I think the-- the numbers for restaurants that are closing, it's just phenomenal at this rate.
What do you do then when you start to see some of these businesses close down? How do you get stores and-- and entrepreneurs-- where's the incentive for them to go in when they're hit with such bureaucracy? How do you-- how do you change that kind of culture?
SCOTT STRINGER: Well, let me-- let me just say that the PPP money really did not come to our small businesses, didn't come to our city. And part of the reason why small businesses are having trouble accessing that-- that money, that program, is because they're not trained in filling out the forms and knowing the rules of the road. New York City agencies should be going door to door into these small businesses, calling the owners and saying, look, let's connect you with every program possible to keep you afloat.
The name of the game is to stay alive as we look at a viral cure, as a vaccine, as a way of making sure the economy can slowly turn on. It's not going to happen overnight. But I think part of the small business crisis is a government New York City crisis. This is man-made, literally man-made. We-- we piled on our small businesses, and now we need a plan to get off their backs and get them back to life. It's not going to be easy. And I do think, as we reimagine the streets of our city, the way we're going to do things differently, restaurants and bars are going to have the hardest time coming back because a lot of that is about indoor dining.
And so we have to take advantage of the streets. That's why I think we should be teaching our kids outdoors. The one thing we know about our economy and our kids' education is if two people are outside, outdoor eating or teaching, they're probably not getting the coronavirus. So why don't we build the city and take advantage of the outdoors the same way they did in New York City in 1918 during the pandemic? We still have a lot of warm months left.
REGGIE WADE: Comptroller Springer, as a former New York City schools teacher, one of the frustrations that me and my fellow colleagues had is we felt like the city wasn't listening to the teachers on the ground in the classroom. Do you feel that teachers' voices are being heard as we're going to reopening schools in the city? And if so, what ways?
SCOTT STRINGER: Well, I have to tell you that the teachers are the last ones to be consulted on major life and death decisions. Keep in mind, teachers lost their lives teaching our children. Our mayor, quite frankly, closed the schools-- took him too long to make a decision to close the schools, and bad things happened. Now he's taking too long to come up with a plan to keep our schools open with safety first in mind. We need nurses in every school. We need a safety officer not for policing, but a medical safety officer in every school.
We should empty out the bureaucrats, Department of Education, put them right into the schools to help teachers. And, look, I'm a public school dad. I got an eight-year-old and a seven-year-old. They're going to-- into third grade and second grade. They survived remote learning. But we've got to now double down and make sure these kids don't get pushed aside because government is incompetent and it's not willing to listen.
I think that's happening on the national level in the Trump administration. It's certainly happening in New York City. Let's listen to the teachers. Let's hear what their thoughts are. We cannot allow people to teach if they don't feel safe, so let's make them safe. And by the way, if we can't move outdoors, there's 30 million square feet of open space schoolyard space in the New York City public school system. You got to use some of it, folks. I mean, just get creative. Get busy. Do something.
