BUFFALO, N.Y. — Restaurants are among the many businesses that are hurting right now because of the pandemic. In the City of Buffalo, lawmakers are trying to help restaurants expand their outdoor capacity for when they're finally allowed to resume dining-in operations.
On Tuesday afternoon, Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown said the city will fast track this legislation for not only restaurants, but for other small businesses as well.
The vast majority of Common Council members are supporting a resolution allowing restaurants to have the right for six months to expand outdoor seating on privately-owned restaurant property, if such property exists. Under normal circumstances a permit would be needed to expand outdoor seating, and that needs to go through an approval process.
Mayor Brown says the application process for businesses to expand outdoors will go live on June 1, and will be accepted until the end of September. There will be no application fee.
"What we will be doing with this application process is giving restaurants and small businesses the ability to apply to get space on streets and sidewalks to provide additional social distancing," Brown said.
There will be capacity limits, but we're not sure what those are from either the state or the city.
Restaurants currently fall into Phase Three of the state's reopening plan, which means if the metrics continue to work in our favor and if Governor Andrew Cuomo continues working in two-week reopening increments, restaurants could expand operations in mid-June.
"There's thousands of food service employees in the City of Buffalo, in Erie County there's 50,000 people that work in the food service industry so it's very important to get this done," Council Member Joel Feroleto said.
Under the resolution, restaurants would not be allowed to install permanent additions without a permit. The resolution was not voted on, on Tuesday.
Council member Feroleto, who worked on this resolution, says city attorneys need to take a look it first.
The owner of Osteria 166, Nick Pitillo says this resolution is a good first step, but there's still a lot of work that needs to be done to install plans in the new normal.
Also, the mayor announced the creation of a "working group" of local business leaders and lawmakers who will help develop plans for small businesses to reopen in Buffalo. Feroleto will chair the working group and the names of those who will serve on it will be released Tuesday.
