Immigrant business owners in East Harlem who filed a class-action lawsuit against Mayor Zohran Mamdani's city-owned supermarket plan say the city responded not with dialogue but with a wave of sanitation fines.
Two days after the Multicultural Business Coalition sued Mamdani and New York City in state Supreme Court, a handful of the coalition's members stood on a sidewalk at East 117th Street and Park Avenue and accused the administration of punishing them for speaking up. The Wednesday press conference, held in front of Elvis Arias's American Deli Mini Mart, sat just two blocks from La Marqueta on East 115th Street, the site where Mamdani wants to open a government-run grocery store that these shop owners say will put them out of business.
The allegation is blunt: the city started hitting coalition-affiliated businesses with Department of Sanitation fines right when the group began knocking on doors to recruit opposition to the mayor's plan. Frank Garcia, the coalition's chairman, told the New York Post the timing was no coincidence.
"When we started going door to door two weeks ago, that's when the fines started."
Garcia said some business owners have been served fines as steep as $1,000. Many of those owners, he added, do not speak English, making it harder for them to contest the citations or even understand the charges.
Diana Larrazabal runs Aroma D' Angel, a flower and gift shop at 304 East 116th Street. She has spent six years helping her Spanish-speaking neighbors deal with city bureaucracy. Now she is dealing with her own pile of city paperwork.
Larrazabal told reporters the Department of Sanitation has fined her shop three times this year, including a $350 citation in May. She said some of the fines were for trash that did not belong to her business. "It's definitely more frequent," she said.
She also drew a parallel that carries weight in the neighborhood. A Costco opened at East 117th Street and FDR Drive in 2010, and Larrazabal said the result was predictable.
"We don't want the same thing to happen to the community as when Costco opened here and [shops] went out of business."
The Mamdani administration has a growing record of rolling out ambitious policies and then deflecting blame when consequences land on ordinary people. The shop owners in East Harlem see the same pattern: City Hall announces a plan, small businesses raise objections, and the city's enforcement apparatus suddenly takes a closer look at their sidewalks.
Elvis Arias, who owns the American Deli Mini Mart where the press conference took place, pleaded with the mayor to move the planned grocery store further north to 125th Street, away from the dense cluster of small shops near East 116th and Park Avenue. He told the Post last week that he would likely need to get a tobacco license just to stay competitive if the city-owned store opens nearby.
His humor was thin but pointed. "I'm lucky I have the beer!" Arias said. "They [won't have beer over there]."
Domingo Fernandez, who has owned Midtown Fish & Meat Market at Park Avenue and East 116th Street since 2012, works seven days a week, twelve-hour days during the week. He spoke briefly in Spanish at the press conference, asking Mamdani to sit down with local businesses before moving forward.
"My store is doing well enough to pay my bills," Fernandez said. "But if that store goes in there, I'm afraid I'll lose business."
Fernandez said he has not recently been fined by the sanitation department. But the broader concern among coalition members is not just about individual tickets, it is about a city government that appears willing to squeeze small operators while building a taxpayer-funded competitor two blocks away.
The Mamdani administration has faced ethics complaints about the misuse of city resources before. Whether sanitation enforcement qualifies as another example is an open question, but the business owners standing on that sidewalk Wednesday had already made up their minds.
When asked about the retaliation allegations Wednesday, Mamdani spokesperson Cassio Mendoza did not address them directly. He referred reporters to the mayor's public comments from Monday, when Mamdani said he was "confident in both the legality of this, that it will stand up in court, and the importance of delivering it."
That answer speaks to the lawsuit. It does not speak to whether the city is leaning on the people who filed it.
A Department of Sanitation spokesperson offered a blanket denial, saying the agency "issues cleanliness violations in all corners of the city" and that its "only goal in issuing violations is to give all New Yorkers the clean streets they deserve." The agency said it has issued 223 commercial summonses across Harlem since March 1.
That figure, standing alone, tells the reader almost nothing. Without a comparison to prior periods or a breakdown by block, it is impossible to know whether enforcement near the coalition's businesses is routine or unusual. The city did not provide that context, a silence that does the administration no favors when the accusation on the table is selective enforcement.
Mamdani has shown a pattern of dodging pointed questions about his administration's conduct rather than answering them head-on. The referral to Monday's talking points fits that mold.
The Multicultural Business Coalition filed its class-action complaint in New York Supreme Court on Monday, naming Mayor Mamdani and the City of New York as defendants. The suit centers on the city-owned supermarket plan, which the coalition argues would create unfair, government-subsidized competition for the immigrant-owned shops that already serve the neighborhood.
Garcia said the nonprofit is the lead plaintiff but plans to add more. The coalition is vetting business owners in both Harlem and Hunts Point in the Bronx, where Mamdani has announced a second subsidized grocery store, to be named as additional plaintiffs.
The legal fight is one front. The organizing is another. And if the coalition's account is accurate, the fines are a third, one the city controls entirely.
Confrontations between the Mamdani administration and New Yorkers who push back on its policies have become a recurring feature of this mayoralty. Homeowners confronted city officials over chaotic tax policy at a heated Council hearing. The administration has blamed staff miscommunication when caught in embarrassing missteps. Each episode follows a familiar arc: the administration acts, citizens object, and City Hall changes the subject.
Several basic facts remain unclear. The coalition has not publicly released copies of the citations or a full count of how many member businesses received fines during the period in question. The city has not explained what specific violations were cited or whether enforcement activity near East 116th Street increased compared to prior months.
No one in the Mamdani administration has directly responded to the retaliation allegation itself, only to the lawsuit it followed. That gap matters. A denial would at least put the claim in dispute. Silence leaves it hanging.
The business owners are not asking for special treatment. They are asking the city to stop building a taxpayer-funded store that competes with the shops they already run, and to stop ticketing them while it does.
When a government decides it can be your competitor and your regulator at the same time, the people who should worry most are the ones who can't afford a lobbyist, or a lawyer who speaks their language.
