Still struggling from the pandemic and facing inflation, restaurant owners are suing the city over the $7,500 outdoor dining fee.
Boston mayor Michelle Wu made the North End, the city’s Little Italy, an offer its restaurateurs couldn’t refuse — and now they’re fighting back.
Wu, a newly elected Democrat, has imposed a $7,500 outdoor dining entry fee as well as a monthly per-parking-spot fee on North End establishments only, arguing that the “the impacts of outdoor dining, on this neighborhood, are unique because of that density.” She has also limited the hours and season during which they can operate outdoors — again, only for the North End.
When neighborhood restaurant owners began speaking out, Wu was initially unbending. “If a critical mass of restaurant owners also believe this program is unworkable as proposed, then I am prepared to rescind North End outdoor dining before the start of the season,” she said in a not-so-veiled threat.
Then, Wu made some small accommodations: At a press conference, she announced that she would allow the establishments to pay the $7,500 fee over a number of months and make “hardship waivers” available that would reduce the fee for struggling restaurants.
Wu was joined by a few owners who expressed their satisfaction with the updated plan. But at the last second, the press conference was moved to a smaller room, shutting out the owners who were not pleased with the compromise on offer.
‘We’re Being Singled Out’
Silenced at the press conference, Wu’s critics have been even louder ever since, and are moving forward with a promised lawsuit. Jorge Mendoza, the owner of Vinoteca di Monica, is leading the charge.
“We’re the only 77 businesses in Boston that are exposed to that charge, out of 11,000 restaurants. And at the same time, we have to pay for parking spots on a monthly basis, which in my case is $1,500 a month. So it’s compounded to about $20,000 per business. A lot of the local businesses who can’t afford it are not going to do it. A lot of the businesses are getting very little space and don’t know what to do because they don’t want to pay $7,500. And we have we have a group of businesses who are joining a lawsuit,” Mendoza told National Review.
Richard Chambers is the attorney representing the owners who are fighting the fees. The suit will be filed Monday, 30 days after he sent the city a demand letter.
The lawsuit will charge the city with violating the owners’ due-process rights by implementing a tax without passing it through the legislature, as well as an equal-protection violation stemming from the city’s decision to single out one neighborhood.
The city’s reasons for moving forward with the fees, he said, were not persuasive. Parking, garbage, small streets — Chambers argued that these are problems all over the city, not just in the North End.
“How come it’s not evenly spread out? How come every other restaurant doesn’t have the same mandate — 7,500 bucks for everybody?” asked Chambers, who advised his clients — he says a dozen have signed on so far — to pay up, and hope that the city pays it back as part of damages. Most of the plaintiffs are keeping their heads down for now, said Chambers, for fear of retaliation.
Mendoza was outraged that that the city would not only add a financial burden to restaurants coming out of the pandemic years and facing rising prices, but do so in a way that picks winners and losers. “Right now, with the gas prices, the fuel cooking gas prices, the price of flour, eggs, meat, chicken, seafoods. I mean, it’s, they are completely out of touch with reality,” said Mendoza. “We have inflation, and she decides to target 77 small businesses in Boston.”
Frank Mendoza, Jorge’s brother and the owner of Monica’s Trattoria, concurred. “Any additional cost to a restaurant is a burden on all of us, not only business owner, but all the way down to any part of the staff, and then the customer,” he explained. To make matters worse, Mendoza said that the North End was coming out of “a really bad winter” that saw business hamstrung by vaccination mandates.
Carla Gomes, the owner of Terramia and Antico Forno, which she’s owned and operated for 29 and 26 years, respectively, noted that outdoor dining kept businesses afloat during the first year of the pandemic, during which indoor dining was either limited, or disallowed completely. Even still, Gomes’s third establishment didn’t make it through the plague years.
She and her neighbors thought they’d have at least one more year of the program, but when the time came to discuss it, North End owners were told to attend a separate Zoom meeting from the rest of the city’s restauranteurs.
When Gomes asked what the funds collected would be used for, city officials said they didn’t know for sure, but suggested it might be used for resident trash pick-up — the restaurants already pay for daily pick-up from their establishments — as well as rodent control and power washing the sidewalks and streets.
Most restaurants, Gomes argued, already power wash the area during outdoor dining season to keep it clean for customers. And as for trash pick-up and rodent control, those are already items in the city’s budget. “We paid this in our taxes, residents pay this in their taxes,” said Gomes, who also pays a pest control company to do a sweep of both of her businesses twice a week. “So who are you kidding?”
When she pushed another official on the subject, she was told that it would go into “beautifying the neighborhood.”
“What are you going to do? You’re going to plant a few trees. What can you possibly do to beautify the north end? Is that going to cost $600,000?” she asked.
Gomes said she was fighting back not just to increase her profit margin, but on principle. “For me it wasn’t never about the money. I never complained that it was about the money. For me it was the discrimination of a neighborhood being charged a fee that no other neighborhood in the city of Boston was being charged,” she said.
During the press conference on hardship waivers, Wu argued that “equity doesn’t mean equality all across the board.” Gomes was aghast.
“How would that go over in any other ethnic neighborhood in the city to say equity is not equality?” she wondered. “We’re being singled out.”
‘It Absolutely Was a Threat’
In addition to the not-insignificant financial burden of the fees, the owners who have vocally opposed them say they have faced retaliation from the city.
“The city’s going around telling people that because we’re suing we’re gonna lose any rights to have outdoor dining in the future,” said Jorge Mendoza. “We’re getting constant inspections now. I get inspected almost every day. They’re looking for reasons to harass me.”
Mendoza alleged that this was a longer-term trend that began when he started publicly opposing Covid restrictions. Inspectors, he alleged, have given him $50 tickets for having an open garbage barrel, or an open cup of coffee in his garbage.
“They’re doing it to the whole neighborhood, sending a message that if you guys don’t comply, we’ll hit you with a $50 charge every day… it’s just an abuse of power,” said Mendoza.
Gomes agreed that the city was out to punish those who had spoken up, and said that it had already been successful in getting others to drop their objections.
Of Wu’s promise to take away outdoor dining if there was continued objections, Gomes argued “it absolutely was a threat. She said that if we made a stink about it, if we oppose this, that she would take away outdoor dining in the North End altogether. So that’s how she divided she threatened them. And then they tried to get us to go along with them. But you know, we stood our ground and said, No, we’re not going along.”
Asked about more frequent inspections, Gomes chuckled. “Yeah, since we decided to send her a letter, as a small group of us got together and retained an attorney and sent her a letter gave her 30 days to answer otherwise it would be a lawsuit on this, yeah.”
“I always run my business 100 percent by the law, and so let them come in,” she added. “But they are they are coming in, I can tell you that much.”
Robert Regnetta, who’s owned Euno for 27 years as of this month, said the punishment has also come in the form of smears and attempts to discredit, rather than debate the protesting restaurateurs. It’s part of what he said was a “policy of dividing and conquering.”
“They tell the story that these are white male bullies that are Trump people and anti-vaxxers,” said Regnetta, who called it “far from the truth.”
“It’s just another insult. These people don’t know who we are. What does it matter who we vote for? Or if we took a vaccine or not?” he asked.
Jorge Mendoza, who grew up in Argentina, called the state of affairs “a scandal,” and told National Review that some are loath to be as loud as him because they’re “afraid that they’re gonna be scrutinized,” and that the city will make life more difficult them.
Mendoza said he was moving forward because he couldn’t allow the country that adopted him to backslide: “I gotta make sure that I’m leaving my children at least equal opportunities that I had, or better opportunities than I had.”