Mayor Promises Not to Flood Boro Park with Inspectors Again, as Enforcement of the Key to NYC Pass Gears Up

By Yehudit Garmaise

     More than 600 canvassers, who have access to translations of more than 180 languages, are hitting the pavement today in a huge outreach and education campaign to assist small business owners with the implementation of the Key to NYC pass, the city’s vaccine mandate that is starting today.

     In addition, the city is setting up 100 pop-up vaccine sites outside many business districts, so customers and employees can get their shots even more easily and conveniently.

    “We want to vaccinate all of the city’s workers and employees alike,” said Mayor Bill de Blasio, who also plans to provide canvassers who speak Yiddish for heimish neighborhoods. “Every vaccine helps us to fight the delta variant.”

     Starting on Sept. 13, city agencies, such as the Department of Healtlh and the Sanitation Department, not the NYPD, will be enforcing compliance with the vaccination mandate, which is punishable with fines that range from $1,000 to $5,000.

     The next month, the mayor said, is for business owners to get their questions answered and to get used to the new vaccination mandate.

     While the perpetually optimistic mayor is sure that his Key to NYC vaccination mandate will have a great impact on getting New Yorkers to be safely inoculated from COVID, this morning, BoroPark24 pointed out that many business owners in Boro Park are still reeling from the vast number of inspectors, sometimes, inexplicably, 12 in one day, who descended on the neighborhood in October 2020 to enforce COVID protocols: the details of which many business owners have said had received no advance email, letter, or phone call, before being served with pricey summonses.

     With civilian agencies returning to neighborhoods to enforce the NYC pass on Sept. 13, the  mayor was asked whether he can guarantee that some neighborhoods will not suffer more numerous and severe inspections and summonses than others.

     “I heard those complaints and concerns last year,” Mayor de Blasio told BoroPark24. “I certainly was not happy with what happened. That was not the goal.”

     Although many Boro Park business owners received citations with stamps of both the state of New York and the New York City, the mayor blamed Gov. Cuomo on last October’s outlandish number of inspectors who roamed 13th Avenue.

     The mayor's response about the citations that flooded the neighborhood last fall was the first time that he has articulated that the state was to blame for the targeting of Boro Park at that time.

     “As you remember, we had a very contentious relationship with the state of New York at that point: mandating additional rules and approaches that weren’t always helpful,” said the mayor, who added that he was hopeful that “we will not be having that problem again” [with the incoming governor, now Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul, with whom the mayor is meeting today to discuss how best to fight COVID and bring the city and state back.

     Unlike the mayor’s many negative comments about Gov. Cuomo, with whom the mayor famously clashed and whom the mayor called “aberrant” in his abuses and bullying of others, Mayor de Blasio only has nice things about Lt. Gov. Hochul, whom he said he only foresees a collegial and productive relationship.

     “Now, we obviously don’t have the same state laws and rules forcing our hands,” the mayor said. “So we will be able to control our own destiny.

      “We want to educate and help the small business owners. We don’t want to penalize anyone if we can avoid it.

      “We can make [this straightforward vaccine mandate] work, and I don’t want to see those kinds of nonstop inspections: that is not our goal.”

Credit: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office.