The Fourteenth Episode of The Get Stuff Done Cast Cast

This is the Get Stuff Done Cast Cast. I’m Dave.

The Mayor of New York City, the pulse of the nation, has a podcast. The only person listening to it is a dog walker in Queens named Dave.

If this is your first time listening, it’s great to have you here. Maybe listen to some early episodes before this one so you get a feel for it? Or listen to them all in order, to get a true understanding of how weird the mayor is? Or not! Do whatever feels best for you. Today, I’m talking about the 14th episode of mayor Eric Adams’ podcast, the Get Stuff Done Cast, titled S1 E14 - Launching America’s Largest Outdoor Dining Program, released August 18th, 2023.

The Mayor has on City Council member Marjorie Velázquez from District 13 in the Bronx, Omar Canales, the operations Manager of Seis Veincos Restaurant in the Bronx, and NYC’s Chief Public Realm Officer Ya-Ting Liu, who are all there to discuss a new bill to codify outdoor dining in NYC.

Having a Public Realm Officer is apparently a hot new thing in cities, to put a point person in charge of coordinating positive changes to public spaces, which are often under the purview of multiple overlapping agencies, and it’s often unclear how to get them all onboard with a change, or who should be in charge of overseeing the change. But it also sounds like a job that someone would have in, like, a depressing episode of Adventure Time, where Finn and Jake wind up in a really neat fantasy kingdom but are forced to get jobs in the behind the scenes bureaucracy, which is honestly kinda like a pretty good description of New York City government, now that I think about it. Adams just created this position in New York for the first time in February of 2023, and Liu is the first to hold it. Liu has been a transit advocate and seems to have a pretty cool history of public advocacy.

I say all of that because I hit pause and did a bunch of research when the episode began. Maybe I’m being unfair and giving into my doubt that Adams will provide that information in a clear and digestible manner, but I’ve been listening to this podcast for a while now.

Adams begins by setting the stage. During the pandemic, outdoor dining exploded in NYC, for fairly obvious reasons, and the city created a program to let restaurants put outdoor dining sheds up, often in the streets, since sidewalk space is a premium.

This was truly a good thing, and also a little wild west. It probably saved 100,000 jobs, but some sheds fell into disrepair and became blights when the restaurants associated with them went out of business. Others somewhat overstepped their mandates and sorta took over space they probably didn’t have the right to have. Some of them cause daylighting problems for pedestrians at corners, or block storm drains and cause small floods of gross street water when it rains. It is both true that these sheds were great - I eat in them all the time - and that they’ve been up for a long time and a lot of them are showing a significant amount of wear. So going back, and putting together a long term series of regulations to govern sheds moving forward makes a ton of sense, now that they’re here, and we’ve seen what’s working and what’s not, and people clearly want these to continue moving forward. The devil is, of course in the details, but I mostly raise this to say: this is just a podcast episode about doing something common sense and relatively small, unless I’m missing something here. Typically doing something that tweaks the regulatory regime that oversees a previous administration’s policy isn’t a source of back-patting or spiked footballs, especially when we’re a year and a half into an administration that has yet to announce a signature effort or major initiative.

The mayor starts in, talking about how he likes outdoor dining, the Parisian feel of it, but he wanted to know how to get it done correctly. He introduces the person he credits with getting this done right, City Council member Marjorie Velázquez, as well as Omar Canales, who owns a restaurant that the mayor doesn’t name, saying, paraphrasing here, I’m going to let him say it, because I’ll butcher the name, and I kinda believe that the Mayor just doesn’t know the name because he’s had no problem winging it on pronunciation in the past. Then he introduces Lui, who I talked about above.

The mayor looks around at everyone who’s here to talk about outdoor dining, and asks them his usual first question, “tell me about your journey” with the usual results that no one really says anything of substance because it’s open ended and vague, and that thing about stupid questions also applies to vague questions.

Omar was born in the Bronx to a Honduran dad, Ecuadoran mom. He opened Seis Veincos in the Bronx, which is not particularly difficult to pronounce. It’s been open for 11 years.

The mayor asks about the pandemic, obviously the pandemic was hard. Asking for help, well, helped.

Asking for help isn’t a bad thing, the mayor says. Sometimes it feels like the mayor sees his role as almost an oracle figure? Sorta a wise character with important pearls to impart every so often, and also sometimes it feels like he just can’t stop himself. I guess I’m bringing it up here because I’m not sure why this gets said to a restaurateur, a city council member and a member of his administration. It’s not like the listening audience is here to hear it, either, this isn’t the mayor’s advice for living podcast, this is the podcast about getting stuff done. This episode, in particular, is supposed to be telling us New Yorkers about important changes to a dining initiative, and that’s something I certainly care about. Tell me the news, man! I can figure out my life on my own.

What about you Councilwoman? yells the mayor. Her parents are Puerto Rican, came here during the 70s. Her parents were involved in community advocacy in the Bronx. The mayor graces us with the information that sometimes helping can feel small, but it’s just as important to do the small things. Helping doesn’t need to be this big gigantic thing. More telling me stuff I either know, or I’ve died from being stupid, in which case I can’t hear this podcast, anyway, and what I want is to hear about outdoor dining.

He tells Liu to tell him her journey. Born in Taiwan, moved here when she was 7. Her grandmother worked in sweatshops in Chinatown. She was the first in her family to go to college, went into public policy and urban planning.

We’re really excited about what you’re going to bring to the city, the mayor tells her, and transition music plays, so, I assume, now that we’re nine minutes in to a 25 minute podcast, now that introductions are out of the way, we can talk about the changes to outdoor dining.

Out of the transition, and whoops I was wrong, because the mayor decides it’s time to talk about the value of hard work. This, he says, is what devastates him about the migrant asylum issue, that people who come here are told they can’t work. The work authorization issue is a federal one, but also the city could probably just certify their own work permits and dare the feds to sue them? At any rate, I kinda feel like there’s stuff going on with regards to migrants fleeing their countries of origin that is probably a bit more heartbreaking than their individual employment status. What we learn from migrants, says Adams, is how to turn pain into purpose. Hokay. Darkness into a planting, he says. Out of all this darkness, an amazing thing grew called outdoor dining.

How did it help you, he asks Omar. Well, it was very helpful during the pandemic. He’d tried to get an outdoor cafe license in 2018, it was expensive and they needed an attorney. A lot of red tape, compliance with a lot of different departments, and ultimately they didn’t do it. But then COVID came, the restrictions were relaxed to fast track outdoor dining and he got his outdoor cafe. It was very helpful to have during social distancing, and he’s looking forward to the rules being more accessible, understandable and easy to comply with the new changes.

The mayor says there’s been a different standard, historically, for restaurants and services, depending on what area of the city you live in, and that Manhattan has always been given the best stuff while the outer boroughs have suffered in some senses. He asks the Velázquez to tell us why she wanted to take on this challenge.

What is this? Is it an oral history of how outdoor dining rule changes were made? Is it an interview with three people involved in some fashion about how they came to make these changes and what they feel like the impact will be? Is it a chummy hang out, between the interviewer, one of his employees and two people whose lives he can ruin if they upset him? I really don’t understand what we’re doing here, 13 minutes in and no one has said what the rule changes are! I feel like Millhouse yelling “Get to the fireworks factory!”

Velázquez answers him by saying she likes food and is a foodie. But also she didn’t have a lot of outdoor dining opportunities in the Bronx. She wants to give people greater options to eat outdoors at their favorite restaurants, create jobs, and give opportunities to the immunocompromised who avoid indoor dining for obvious reasons. She says there are people upset on both sides and that’s how she knows they’ve done a good job, but no one has defined the sides here, what they want, or what any of us are getting!

WHAT ARE YOU CHANGING ABOUT OUTDOOR DINING THAT IS MAKING BOTH SIDES OF THE ISSUE OF OUTDOOR DINING SO MAD???

Finally, 18 minutes in, Adams asks Liu for the ABCs of the bill, and the new rules that are in place.

Liu says that the next step is the rule making process where the city will propose and layout a very clear set of guidelines.

Listener, I tasted blood.

She continues: The public will have the opportunity to provide feedback and comment on the proposed changes.

I threw the phone I was listening to this on into the sea. I have no phone now.

She goes on: We’re about to embark on this transparent process.

I bit a chunk out of my dining room table.

She finishes up: Once we finalize those rules, we’ll open the outdoor dining application portal in 2024 and restaurants will be able to apply.

I am using a bone saw to cut off my own head.

What the fuck was this? They haven’t yet done the thing they’re doing a podcast about doing? And the thing isn’t even that impressive? They keep mentioning outdoor cafes in Paris, and yes having outdoor cafes in Paris is really nice, I’ve sat at them. Also no one there is shrieking THIS WAS SO HARD THANK GOD FOR MINOR TWEAKS TO THE APPLICATION PROCESS they just sit on a chair outside and have a glass of wine and some cheese!

Liu says that one thing the mayor has been very clear about is that we need to center the experience of the end user and as the end user of this incredibly useless fucking podcast I have a whole lot of thoughts on that.

How important is it for the process to be clear and to respect your time, asks the mayor, evidently unaware that he’s spent 20 minutes being extremely unclear and wasting everyone’s time. Omar responds that it’s important.

Wait, the council member says something, she just slides it in, you blink and you miss it. The application is full year for sidewalk, 8 months for curbside, she says. What that says to me, and I could be wrong about this, is that there actually already are some rules that must have passed the council they’re going to enforce, and that one of them is that curbside dining will have to involve much more temporary structures that can be taken down four months out of the year, and, I guess, stored somewhere? That’ll add a great deal of work putting up and taking down these structures, it’ll require storage space that, obviously cannot be in the same areas of the restaurant that, like, are used for food prep, which are most areas that aren’t where you sit and eat. I’ll kill most curbside dining, which is a lot of the outdoor dining that’s available, because sidewalks are narrow.

And then they’re done. Fucking christ I hate this fucking podcast.

What did the Very Bad Mayor do from July 31st 2023, when his previous episode was released until this one was released on August 18th? As always I lean heavily on the reporting from The City and Hell Gate, two really vital NYC news organizations that you should absolutely support. Links to their websites are in the show notes.

Well, a weird twitch streamer promised his followers playstations if they came to union square and a lot of them did and then they got grumpy when there weren’t any playstations there. This lead the NYPD to arrive in force and basically beat the hell out of some unruly, playstationless, teens. Adams thanked the NYPD for their restraint.

Adams’ effort to switch 250,000 city employee retiree health plans from Medicare to a private Medicare Advantage plan was permanently struck down by a judge in Manhattan supreme court capable of looking at words on a contract and reading them.

Politico reported that the Wednesday night charity food distributions that the mayor often takes part in, which we discussed in a previous episode, are often disrupted by the mayor’s presence. He’s often late, he attracts protestors, there are people who refuse food if the mayor is offering it due to the mayor’s anti-homeless policies. He also brings guests who sometimes seem to be doing this for instagram clout, they take pictures and then bounce without actually helping, and he has bought in no city money for the organization responsible.

Hell Gate - the paper I keep telling you to subscribe to - did some actual reporting on the bill that Adams and his guests were theoretically discussing during this episode. It did pass the city council, and while there will be, I guess, listening and design sessions, as they discussed, it does have some specific rules: no curbside dining during winter months, which must be the 8 months on/4 months off thing, fees for restaurants that want licenses to do curbside or sidewalk dining, veto power by the Landmarks Preservation Commission if the proposed dining will happen in a historic district, which covers a huge amount of the city, and guidelines that will probably get rid of the ability to heat structures when it’s cold, or keep diners dry when it’s raining. Apparently restaurant owners are pissed, and it’s weird that the one restaurant owner Adams had on didn’t have anything to say about this.

My guess is that this is why Liu responded to his question about the specifics of the bill with vagaries about the process moving forward: as the Public Realm Officer, her job is not to champion the bill, but to work with the public on the changes to public space. In other words, the mayor asked the wrong person. The council member than shotgunned in a few of the changes, but again they went by quick, and it was practically impossible to parse. A reasonable solution would have been to go back thirty seconds, edit the confusion out, and rerecord, but the someone would have had to have been there who was able to suggest to the mayor that they should redo the take with him asking the person who actually wrote the bill what it did and apparently there was no one in the room who could do such a thing.

The City - the paper I keep telling you to subscribe to - discovered that at least 127 donations to Adams’ campaign were fraudulent, and due to the city’s public matching fund for small donors these small donors bought in over 200,000 of public money to Adams’ campaign. Fortunately for Adams this was the last time any shadiness with campaign donations was discovered.

One other note from the future. Velázquez lost her re-election campaign, handing a republican from the Bronx a city council seat for the first time since the 80s. This appears to have nothing to do with outdoor dining, it’d honestly be insane if it did, but her loss does have some overlap: Velázquez lost, evidently, because she supported building housing in her district, which is a relatively well off district in the Bronx. A lot of the pushback that outdoor dining has received has also been of the NIMBYish, you’re going to inconvenience me by taking free public parking spaces away or really in any way at all for a public good variety. I didn’t follow her election carefully, so I don’t really know how she did at messaging, but I guess I’d say that, in general, the Democratic party seems to keep getting tripped up by the idea that people need to get sold on things, and other people will try to undermine them, so you need to be convincing in your messaging. It seems to keep surprising them, which is weird, particularly since they pay so much for messaging consultants.

If you liked this, or thought it was interesting and want to hear more, the best way to make sure you do so is to hit subscribe on whatever podcatcher app you’re using to hear my voice right now. The best way to let other people know about this podcast is to tell a friend or enemy about it, but I refuse to believe that liking it does anything, and reviewing it will just take up moments of your life that you could be telling a friend or, I don’t know, watching Blade again since it’s been years since you saw it.

Transcripts of this show are available at:

https://stuffstuffcastcast.wixsite.com/stufftranscripts

I’d love to hear from you. You can email me at:

stuffstuffcastcast@gmail.com

See you next time.