City Council Hearing on the Environmental Control Board January 31, 2005 10 a.m. Testimony of Sean Basinski Director, Street Vendor Project Good morning, I’ Sean Basinski, I’m a former strect vendor and now director of the Street Vendor Project at the Urban Justice Center. As you know, vendors are one of the main categories of litigants at the Environmental Control Board. There are about 40,000 vending tickets that are adjudicated at ECB every year, and represent vendors at ECB in hundreds if not thousands of those cases. We are there two or three mornings a week, I want to talk about two things today, the first is the daily operation of what happens at ECB every day and the need for improvement there. The second is the Board itself and how it has behaved undemocratically against yendors and other small businesses. Unlicensed vendors are still dealt with in the criminal courts, but the cases of licensed vendors were transferred over to ECR in the late 70’s. The feeling was that criminal court judges did not deal with vendors harshly enough. So what you have now is a situation where legal, licensed, taxpaying vendors are treated more harshly than unlicensed vendors. They have also lost many of the protections that exist in criminal court. So, even though 90% of vendors are immigrants and many do not speak English, there are no translators at ECB, as there would be in criminal court. You can imagine what kind of justice is done when the Administrative law Judge is sitting in the room with only one other person, the vendor, and the vendor doesn’t speak English and the judge doesn’t speak his or her language. My office sometimes has to pay people to come translate, but we are a small non-profit and we can’t afford it The city should be paying for that. Another right that is given up at ECB is the right of cross examination, At ECB you may request the presence of the issuing officer, but if the officer doesn’t show up, and they usually don’t, the case is not disinissed. You have had to miss another day of work and you are hack where you started. These are what | believe are the two main day-to-day problems at FCB, and they lead to a rough form of justice.Talso want to talk about the actions that the Board has taken recently that have a great affect on small businesses. The ECB has raised fines against small businesses over the years with no accountability, and in 2003 they quadrupled the fines against vendors, up to $1,000 per violation. The vote on this was unanimous and, from what I can tell from their minutes, there was litle or 10 discussion. They are now being much more carefull in terms of their procedures, but that is uot correcting the structural problem that exists. So, for example, they said “we have to give you a public hearing, we'll give you a public hearing,” and 140 vendors showed up to speak against the fine increase and not one person spoke in favor of it And yet now the ECB hus proposed a fine increase that is almost identical to the one the court found illegal. City Council often lays out very wide penalty ranges, and the ECB has a very great power to determine the fines within those ranges. But there is no accountability -- the ECB is not an elected body. It is controlled by the very same agencies that are proposing to raise the fines, so of course the fines will he raised. We could have brought 1,000 vendors to that hearing and it wouldn’t have made any difference. We have a proposal to change the Administrative Code so that City Council, not ECB, determines what the proper penalty levels arc and when they should be changed. But in the meantime, we ask that City Council work with ECB to let them know what the fines should he within the ranges that have been set. You are the ones that have been elected by the people and you are the ones that are accountable. Thank you very much.