Viverito's Golden Parachute

Mellisa Mark-Viverito is making a last minute
push to pass Intro #1303; a $$$$ scam with numerous violations of NY State law

Viverito's Vending $candal

by Robert Lederman

Extensive evidence [linked at the end of this article] indicates that City Council Speaker Mellisa Mark-Viverito is working with a corporation, MOVE Systems, to privatize all vending in NYC. MOVE Systems is backed by Wall Street billionaires, a natural gas company, one of the nations largest financial service providers and NYC real estate investors.

As a key part of this backroom deal, she has thrown her full influence behind Intro #1303-2016, a misguided law creating thousands of new food vending permits, seemingly in order to serve the interests of just one corporation.

If the hidden agenda behind Intro #1303-2016 is implemented, it could end the livelihoods of the City's 20,000 independent legal vendors and replace them with a citywide vending monopoly.

MOVE Systems is no mom and pop food vending operation.

It's board of directors includes:

*Richard Schaeffer, the billionaire former Chairman of NYMEX Holdings, Inc. and the New York Mercantile Exchange;

*Winston C. Fisher, the billionaire Co-Chair of the NYC Regional Economic Development Council who serves as a Trustee on the Citizens Budget Commission. He is a member of the Real Estate and Construction Council of Lincoln Center, serves on the Board of the Realty Foundation of New York, and is on the Board of Trustees at Syracuse University;

*Tom Higgins, Chief Administrative Officer of First Data, a mobile financial services corporation. Higgins retired in 2010 after a 24-year career with the U.S. Government. He worked in the national security and foreign policy areas and was a member of the Senior Executive Service. Prior to joining First Data, Higgins was the head of Operational Control at JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Why are Wall Street bankers, an international financial services corporation, a natural gas energy provider, a former national security officer and the ambitious Speaker of the NY City Council involved in an effort by a food vending corporation to monopolize NYC vending?

*Follow The Money

An average food cart in NYC will consistently earn $1,500 to $3,000 a day if it establishes regular customers or is located in an area with tourists. Assuming an average take of $1,500 from one cart and multiplying that by just the 500 MOVE carts the City Council plans to install on the streets via Intro #1303-2016, that would come to $750,000 a day.

Multiply that steady stream of dependable food cart sales by 365 days and it comes to $273,750,000 per year. That's a pie with enough slices to feed the hungriest politicians.

According to a press release distributed by Council Speaker Viverito about the MOVE food cart initative (see evidence below), “NYC has nearly 8,000 food carts.”

From the text of Intro # 1303-2016: “Intro #1303-2016 would gradually expand the number of permits to vend food on the streets and sidewalks of New York City, roughly doubling the total number over the course of seven years.”

The Speaker apparantly envisions an armada of 16,000 food carts under this law. Other than a financial incentive, what could possibly induce Speaker Viverito to reverse 100 years of determined efforts by the City Council to reduce the number of vendors in NYC, and instead to literally double them?

Under current NYC rules, all food carts are required to meet stringent standards of construction and operation, including sanitation and NYC Health Department specifications about the commissaries where they are stored overnight, sanitized and supplied with food. Speaker Viverito's City Council writes all the vending laws and could change them at any time so as to benefit MOVE.

Once the MOVE carts become the new standard, the thousands of food carts that Speaker Viverito envisions would have to comply with the same high tech design features.

MOVE systems would provide the carts, the natural gas, the mobile financial services, the electrical pedestals that MOVE and Con Ed will have to install citywide to serve the carts and the commissaries that are required by NYC law to service, supply and clean all food carts. Imagine the revenue from supplying the hotdogs, bottles of water, buns, cleaning supplies and fuel to 16,000 standardized food carts.

A corporation with that kind of money flow could easily fund Speaker Viverito's campaign to be the next Mayor. Is that what Intro #1303-2016 is really about?

*Why Doesn't MOVE Systems Open Up 500 New Food Carts Themselves? Why Issue Thousands Of New Food Permits To Illegal Vendors When NYC is Allegedly Overwhelmed With The Present Number Of Legal Vendors?

This is the keypoint exposing the entire scam behind Intro #1303-2016. It explains why the new law and the MOVE agenda are directly connected:

Under NYC law you can only own one food vending permit.

Without thousands of new food permit holding vendors to work with, MOVE systems could operate only one food cart. If the City Council were not persecuting immigrant food vendors so fiercely, there would be no demand for the MOVE carts and no backroom deal for the Councilmembers sponsoring this bill.

The immigrant vendors who obtain the new permits will in effect be serfs, working in carts owned by MOVE. The corporation can afford to give them use of the carts for free because they will be selling them all their supplies, gas, electricity and food as well as getting millions each month in advertising revenue from the ads on the carts and millions in fees it will earn from all the credit card transactions on all of the carts.

*The Natural Gas Connection Behind This Deceptive Vending Initiative

Among the biggest political controversies in NY is the issue of fracking natural gas. One of the world's largest reservoirs of shale gas is the Marcellus region of Upstate NY. This same area is the source of all NYC drinking water.

Activists have successfully pressured Governor Cuomo to ban shale gas fracking due to many health, safety and environmental issues. In States where fracking is widespread like Oklahoma and Pennsylvania, shale fracking has caused thousands of earthquakes, polluted ground water and damaged the health of people and animals. For now, there is a total ban on shale gas fracking in NY State.

If fracking were to permanently pollute NYC's pristine water source (considered the best drinking water in the entire U.S.) it would create an immediate financial, social and public health catastrophe. Estimates are that the City would have to spend billions to construct a new water filtration plant where none is now needed.

It would be hard to find a single resident constituent of the Speakers that wants gas fracking to be legal in Upstate NY, yet the Speaker is boosting the gas industry and exploiting immigrant vendors to do so.

What a publicity coup for the desperate NY State natural gas fracking industry to be able, with Speaker Viverito's help, to show off 500 brand new food carts “cleanly” powered by natural gas.

From Council Speaker Viverito's press release:

http://council.nyc.gov/html/pr/051115vc.shtml

"Being the fuel provider to MOVE's cleaner, safer vehicles is an honor for Clean Energy," said Peter Grace, Senior Vice President of Sales at Clean Energy Fuels. "Everyone is a winner with the launch of these eco-friendly vehicles, especially New Yorkers who love their food carts." Clean Energy Fuels is the leading provider of natural gas fuel for transportation in North America. First Data and Clean Energy Fuels are both investors in MOVE Systems.”

*A Useful Idiot

Aiding the deceptive efforts of Council Speaker Viverito and MOVE to privatize food vending in NYC is Sean Basinski, founder of The Street Vendor Project (SVP). Some experienced street vendors with firsthand exposure to his group know it by a different name (the Surveillance of Vendors Project).

SVP claims to be NYC's main vendor advocacy organization, yet it's funded in part by the NY City Council (every street vendor's worst enemy); Wall Street firms; banks; The U.S. Dept of Justice; and real estate developers all of whom are BID (Business Improvement District) members. The BIDs wrote virtually all the anti vending ordinances ever passed by the NY City Council.

Basinski's 17 years of “vendor advocacy” has resulted in zero gains and huge losses for vendors. Thousands of immigrants that the NYPD were previously allowing to sell under the First Amendment without a license lost their right to sell handcrafts, pottery and handmade jewelry due to a misguided lawsuit SVP sponsored, lost, and then never appealed (Mastrovincenzo v City of NY). Basinski has advocated for licensing First Amendment protected artists, despite NYC law and Federal Court rulings explicitly stating that they are exempt from any license or permit.

At the same time, he has publicly defended the illegal sale of food from unlicensed, unheigenic carts and the sale of copyright infringed, bootleg and trademark infringed goods on NYC streets by the members of the SVP.

Basinski variously claims to represent anywhere from 100 to all 20,000 vendors who work in NYC yet his group consists of a very small number of food and merchandise vendors, most of whom are vending illegally. These are the vendors Councilmembers posture in front of on the steps of City Hall while proclaming their love for all NYC vendors and their sincere efforts to reform vending for our benefit.

Most of the City's 20,000 vendors, both legal and illegal, consider Basinski one of the biggest threats to vending rather than an advocate for it. For the past three Council Speakers, he has been the perfect beard to hide their anti vendor agenda.

*Privatizing The Vending

For more than two decades City Councilmembers have been suggesting that privatization of vending on NYC streets is the only solution to what they describe as a vending nightmare. Privatization has already taken place in the NYC Parks for all vendors, other than those protected by the First Amendment. It is worth noting that before becoming Speaker, CM Viverito was the chair of the Parks Committee.

Virtually every vendor you see standing behind a food cart inside a NYC Park is an immigrant employee of a food vending corporation. According to the NY Times, many are paid less than the minimum wage. Most of the thousands of food carts currently working in NYC Parks are owned by just three vending corporations, with the Parks Department deliberately creating a monopoly in order to make managing them easier.

Contrary to her press release, Speaker Viverito's plan is not about creating thousands of newly licensed independent food vendors. It is about making all the City's vendors subservient to a corporation she's closely connected to, with Intro # 1303-2016 as the vehicle for accomplishing it.

*The MOVE Food Carts Are A Trojan Horse Guaranteeing That All Sidewalk Vending Spots Will Be Privatized

If you examine the MOVE website you will see that the carts are only one part of their plan. Each cart will be tethered to a sidewalk charging station that will have to be connected to the electric grid by Con Ed. Such an infrastructure plan will cost millions to install and necessitates that the vending spots be permanently reserved for these specific carts so that no other vendors set up in them.

For that to happen the entire street vending system of law would have to dramatically change. Since NYC was founded it has been a first come first served system with no one “owning” a particular vending spot on the public sidewalks.

The Viverito-MOVE agenda would require a citywide concession system where all vending spots are reserved, not just those for food vending, and all vending spots are acquired by bidding against every other vendor.

This is the system the City Council must implement in order for the MOVE plan to function, though neither Speaker Viverito or her co-sponsors will publicly admit it. In fact, it's unlikely the co sponsors have fully thought out what the ramifications of this Intro would be on the streets. Like the members of Congress, they vote for bills the Speaker tells them to support but often haven't even read.

With the MOVE carts being the Trojan Horse that opens the doors to permanently destroying independent vending, one corporation with the financial resources to bid for all the vending spots will try to get a citywide franchise, exactly as Citibank did with the Citibikes and as Cemusa got for their thousands of electronic street furniture billboards. All the presently existing independent vendors, regardless of what they are selling or what cart they are now using, will be eliminated. A Mayor Viverito could be instrumental in granting such a franchise.

*But Isn't Intro #1303-2016 About Helping Poor Immigrant Vendors?

Helping immigrants become legal vendors is a positive goal which most New Yorkers, and most legal vendors, completely support. But there is no evidence that this bill will, in the long run, help the oppressed vendors it claims to be aiding.

Once privatization and bidding for vending spots begins, the food vendors Council Speaker Viverito and The Street Vendor Projects' Basinski are pretending to be advocates for have no chance of outbidding a vending corporation like MOVE for a vending spot, considering that MOVE is backed by the Council Speaker and billionaires with virtually unlimited financial and political resources.

*What Is The Payoff For Viverito and the Other Councilmembers For Supporting A Bill That The BIDs and The Entire Business Community Opposes?

The powerful Business Improvement Districts want dramatically fewer vendors in their territories, not many thousands more. In fact, virtually every BID was founded specificly to eliminate local vendors. Why are councilmembers supporting a bill so completely at odds with political reality? Who exactly is the constituency that the Speaker of the City Council and her minions are trying to satisfy?

It is surely not the inept Street Vendor Project. It can't be the thousands of immigrant vendors who illegally vend food today, since this bill will eventually put most of them out of business.

Nor is it the thousands of street artists, disabled vets or licensed general merchandise vendors who are now legally working, and who will be displaced by the privatization of vending.

Could it be the Wall Street and real estate billionaires behind this huge vending scam who will benefit? The environmentally criminal fracking industry? Elected officials hungry for big campaign contributions?

All three groups?

Decide for yourself after you examine the evidence.

*A Final Point:

Despite the criticisms detailed in this article, the concept of eco friendly food carts is reasonable, as is the business model of a company giving vendors free carts in exchange for a cut of the various cash flows.

Likewise the notion of legitimizing immigrant vendors so they can legally vend.

The problem is that these two ideas, once intermixed and mutated together by the Speaker and her co sponors, will be used to create a toxic effect on all of the City's vendors. Moreover, it seems very clear that those backing Intro # 1303-2016 are far more interested in helping themselves than in helping vendors.

If these elected officials are truly interested in helping us, here's a suggestion that 100% of the City's vendors would support:

We need fewer and more rational restrictions, not more and more arbitrary restrictions crafted by the BIDs. We need rational and informed, rather than more vicious and ignorant, enforcement of the existing laws.

How about training the NYPD so they actually understand the vending laws and respond to situations where enforcement is really needed rather than acting as rent a cop enforcers who respond to every trivial demand of the BIDs?

We do not need the re-creation of the hated Street Vendor Review Panel, which Intro # 1303 also proposes or a new pseudo police force specifically to target and harass vendors, as this bill also proposes. These add ons to Intro #1303 expose the utter hypocricy of those proposing this bill.

Why give thousands of immigrants a new license, then create bigger and better ways to restrict where they can sell while you harass, summons and arrest them?

And if you want input from the City's vendors, try inviting real vendor advocates to your hearings and meetings rather than exclusively dealing with a fake vendor advocacy group that you helped create and fund.

LINKS:

*Official City Council page on Intro # 1303-2016

http://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=2858236&GUID=EFEAD05C-4A4E-47E3-ACDA-ADEAA0FB3F2A&Options=&Search=

*MOVE Systems

https://www.movesystems.com/

MOVE Systems board of directors and staff

https://www.movesystems.com/about#team

*Speaker Viverito's press release announcing MOVE initiative:

http://council.nyc.gov/html/pr/051115vc.shtml

OR here:

https://www.scribd.com/document/327697061/Viverito-MOVE-Press-Release

*Electrical stands installed on NYC sidewalks for the MOVE food carts:

https://www.movesystems.com/our-solutions#MRV

From the MOVE website: “Simply Grid's curbside electrification enables the provisioning of electricity to mobile food vendors and idling vehicles in order to meet their energy needs.”

*Food Carts Get a High End Reboot, Wall Street Journal

https://www.scribd.com/document/327696248/Food-Carts-Get-a-High-End-Reboot-WSJ

Food Trucks In NYC To Ditch Diesel, Go Solar In Attempt To Clean Up City's Air Pollution

https://www.scribd.com/document/327696335/Food-Trucks-in-NYC-to-Ditch-Diesel-Go-Solar-in-Attempt-to-Clean-Up-City-s-Air-Pollution

*The Future Of Food Carts (From the MOVE Systems website)

https://www.scribd.com/document/327696659/Future-of-Food-Carts

*NY Times 9/4/03, The Six Figure Price Tag For Selling A $2 Hot Dog

(Describes how most NYC food vendors are already low wage employees of corporations)

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/05/nyregion/the-six-figure-price-tag-for-selling-a-two-dollar-hot-dog.html

*New York Aims for Eco-Friendly Street Food, Wall Street Journal

https://www.scribd.com/document/327696755/new-york-aims-for-eco-friendly-street-food-wsj

*Big landlord backs eco-friendly food-cart startup, CRAINS

http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20151117/TECHNOLOGY/151119871/big-landlord-backs-eco-friendly-food-cart-startup

*Basinski defends the sale of counterfeit and trademark infringed merchandise by members of The Street Vendor Project:

https://www.scribd.com/document/327697002/Basinski-Supports-Counterfeit-Vendors

Queens Courier: City Council targets 'bootleg' vendors, Wednesday, November 22, 2006

EXCERPT:

Vendors of counterfeit goods, beware. A bill introduced to the City Council recently would let the City's Department of Consumer Affairs (DCA) levy higher fines and summonses to peddlers selling bootleg DVDs, fake designer jeans, and faux bags...Industry insiders estimate that about $31 billion was spent on counterfeit goods last year in the City, up from an estimated $23 billion in 2003...However, Sean Basinski, director of the Street Vendors Project, a non-profit dedicated to helping the estimated 10,000 street vendors in New York City, said that the new bill could hurt financially struggling vendors more than it helps. "Going after vendors is really going after the smallest fish in the pond," Basinski said. "The City Council should be instead punishing the people who are making millions off of it and not the poor people who are selling this only because they have to support their families."

Many street vendors can barely support themselves with their earnings, said Basinski, who guessed vendors opted to sell counterfeit goods because they can usually fetch higher prices and better profits. All vendors who sell counterfeit goods are unlicensed, he said.

"Even if you sell totally legitimate merchandise you are going to be arrested," Basinski said. "Vendors think that you might as well sell what will make you money in those few hours that you have to sell before you have to run from the police."

Comments or questions?

Robert Lederman

President of A.R.T.I.S.T.

(Artists' Response To Illegal State Tactics)

artistpres@gmail.com

(201) 777-0391 (leave a message)

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UPDATE 12/07/2017

https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/city-hall/story/2017/12/07/mark-viverito-seeks-to-expand-street-vending-industry-137766

Mark-Viverito makes last minute push to expand street vending industry

By SALLY GOLDENBERG

12/07/2017 05:06 AM EST