New York is a city built on the creativity and hard work of its entrepreneurs and small business owners. We are working to make it is easier than ever for them to get the information and assistance they need to start and grow their businesses and to exercise their rights during inspections.

Immigrant business owners have frequently faced unnecessary difficulty dealing with City inspectors. To address this, we passed legislation requiring that City inspectors be trained to follow specific protocols when interacting with non-English speakers, ensuring that such inspectors provide language translation services during inspections.

Last summer, we passed a bill requiring the Department of Small Business Services to create dedicated advocates to help business owners obtain services from City agencies.

Small business owners are often too busy running their businesses to visit City agencies that offer assistance. That is why we allocated $400,000 to establish Chamber On-The-Go. This initiative deploys mobile vans around the City, staffed with personnel from City agencies and borough chambers of commerce, to bring City and chamber services directly to those they serve.

Violations should only be given to small businesses when there are clear offenses. We passed legislation requiring City tribunals to analyze which violations are ultimately dismissed so that the Department of Consumer Affairs can target its efforts to reduce the number of unnecessary and invalid violations.

Getting feedback on performance is important to small businesses around the City, and should be important to City government as well. That’s why we passed legislation requiring agencies that inspect small businesses to get feedback on the inspection process.

To support the small businesses of tomorrow, we provided $1.4 million to launch new technology incubators at community colleges in the outer boroughs to support technology entrepreneurs.