A coalition of immigrant business owners has threatened New York City with a lawsuit over planned government-owned grocery stores they say will unfairly undermine their businesses.<\/p>\n
On Monday, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani <\/a>said he would move forward with building a series of government owned grocery stores and promised a 30% discount on certain staple items such as fresh produce, meat and seafood.<\/p>\n According to a report by the New York Post<\/a>, the board of the Multicultural Business Coalition\u2014which \u201cformed earlier this year to create a unified front against Mamdani\u2019s grocery policy\u201d\u2014decided to file a lawsuit to stop the project. The chairman of the group has complained that the Mamdani administration won\u2019t meet with them and hear their concerns about the planned stores.<\/p>\n \u201cThe mayor doesn\u2019t seem to want to sit down with us,\u201d the organization\u2019s chairman Frank Garcia said in an interview with the Post.<\/p>\n Fox News reported<\/a> that the coalition \u201cis now planning to send a letter to Mamdani\u2019s office in the coming days detailing its upcoming legal plans to protect competing stores, bodegas and other small businesses.\u201d<\/p>\n The New York City Chamber of Commerce noted that MBC was created<\/a> to represent \u201cHispanic, Asian, Caribbean, African, Middle Eastern, Jewish, South Asian, and immigrant constituencies, with particularly strong representation from the New York\u2013New Jersey region.\u201d<\/p>\n The chairman stressed that his organization is not launching partisan attacks on Mamdani and the New York City government, but rather is trying to raise awareness of how policies are affecting businesses.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re nonpartisan. So we\u2019re going to meet everybody, Republican or Democrat,\u201d Garcia told Fox News. \u201cThere was a Democratic Jewish organization. There were others that we\u2019re gonna meet with [along with] civil rights organizations. We\u2019re gonna be with all the different civil rights organizations that are willing to support this and have the funding already to fund this.\u201d<\/p>\n The coalition plans to move ahead with the lawsuit if the mayor \u201cdoes not respond or meet with the organization within the next three weeks,\u201d Fox News reported.<\/p>\n The mayor\u2019s office has not commented publicly on the potential lawsuit. The Daily Signal reached out to the mayor\u2019s office about whether officials plan to meet with the coalition but did not receive a reply by publication time.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are not looking to compete with bodegas or grocery stores when it comes to their ability to survive,\u201d Mamdani said at his Monday press conference announcing the municipal grocery stores.<\/p>\n Mamdani ally Gustavo Gordillo, a chairman of New York City\u2019s chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, dismissed the idea that the stores offering below-market prices on goods would hurt local businesses.<\/p>\n \u201cIf one publicly owned grocery store that brings prices down in the neighborhood is enough to put someone out of business, then maybe they shouldn\u2019t have been in that business in the first place,\u201d Gordillo said in a recent interview on Fox News<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A coalition of immigrant business owners has threatened New York City with a lawsuit over planned government-owned grocery…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":310878,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[9,24,55,54,56],"class_list":["post-310877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-ny"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=310877"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310877\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/310878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}