You heard right: We’re cheering for Mayor Bill.
As public advocate, Bill de Blasio shared The Post’s complaint that Gotham’s restaurants and small businesses were being squeezed by city inspectors handing out hefty fines. As mayor, he has just taken a step in the right direction by overhauling the city’s rules for restaurant inspection.
We’ve long complained the old inspection regime had morphed from a means to ensure food quality and cleanliness into an easy way for the city to rack up hundreds of millions in revenue. This was underscored when The Post reported that nearly one-third of all restaurant fines were lumped together in the “all other” category.
Last year, the City Council took the first steps to relax the Health Department’s inspection regime, leading to a 23 percent drop in fines. The new rules will ease them by a further 25 percent, even while increasing the number of inspections.
There will be fixed penalties, at levels reverting to the period before letter grades had to be posted. Moreover, a restaurant that gets an A will be exempt from some previous summonses, and an agency ombudsman will be available to help eateries negotiate complaints. They can also request an ungraded, penalty-free consultative inspection to get advice about meeting agency requirements.
The aggressive expansion of fines under Mike Bloomberg was less about keeping diners safe from bad food than shaking down easy targets for cash. Good for Mayor de Blasio for following through on his promise to bring our restaurants and small businesses relief from this harassment.