Julie Menin, Hotel Trades Council Amend Hotel Licensing Bill

Small hotels will be exempt from certain rules under the latest version of a controversial licensing bill.

City Council member Julie Menin reached a final agreement with the hotel union and operators to exempt small hotels, those with fewer than 100 rooms, from provisions in the bill that require hotels to directly employ all of their core staff. The latest version of the measure is expected to be up for a vote next week.

This month, Menin reached a compromise with the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council and the Hotel Association of New York City to allow hotels to subcontract work that requires “highly technical skills,” meaning, for example, they would be allowed to subcontract engineers rather than hiring them directly.

After this deal was announced, the Hotel Association of New York City, which represents hotel operators, said it asked Menin and the union to further accommodate “mom-and-pop” hotels.

“We were able to negotiate a version of the final bill that now addresses the concerns of both our large and small hotels, and will allow the hotel industry and its workers to thrive in New York City for years to come,” HANYC President and CEO Vijay Dandapani said in a statement.

Menin said the change was made after conversations with HANYC and hearing from small hotel operators about the importance of seasonal hiring. The measure, dubbed the Safe Hotels Act, still requires these hotels to obtain licenses in order to operate in the city.

“The core public safety and worker protection provisions still apply to them,” Menin said.

The measure requires hotels to meet certain safety and sanitation standards in order to secure a license, including continuous staffing at front desks and panic buttons for core employees entering occupied guest rooms. But the measure quickly became a debate over whether the City Council was simply trying to boost union hotels by driving up costs for their nonunion counterparts.

The bill also underscored the fissure between the Hotel Association of New York City and its national affiliate, American Hotel & Lodging Association. The latter disapproved of the amended measure agreed upon earlier this month, and submitted its own version that was ignored.

The national group and the NYC Minority Hotel Association both felt left out of negotiations and argued that the bill catered to union interests. “There should’ve been a conversation with people like us to understand the impact of this bill,” Jagruti Panwala, a member of NYCMHA and an individual representative on AHLA’s board, said at the time.

A spokesperson for AHLA said that while the changes reflect some of the changes sought by the group, the bill “continues to include widespread and negative impacts for the hotel industry and NYC’s tourism economy.”

“This latest, and apparently final, version of the bill makes it vividly clear that this was never truly about health and safety. If the city council is willing to permit subcontractors in hotels with 100 rooms or less, there is no reason why this legitimate business practice should be banned for hotels with 100 or more rooms,” the group said in a statement.

In a statement, Rich Maroko, president of the union, said he was “thrilled” by the progress of the measure, and said the latest version preserves the bill’s intent.

“The goal of this legislation has always been to set a sensible framework that would codify and improve basic health, safety and quality standards for workers and guests at hotels citywide,” he said.