**New York City Advisory Commission on Property Tax Reform Public Hearing in Brooklyn**

A number of merchants and property owners along Fifth Avenue have expressed concerns about the yearly increase in property taxes that they have been experiencing. We wanted to share this opportunity to voice your concerns with the New York City Advisory Commission on Property Tax Reform, which was formed by Mayor Bill de Blasio and City Council Speaker Corey Johnson to develop recommendations to make the City’s property tax system simpler, clearer, and fairer, while ensuring that there is no reduction in revenue used to fund essential City services.

The date and location for the hearing in Brooklyn is:

**Monday, October 15, 2018 **
**Brooklyn Borough Hall, The Courtroom **
**209 Joralemon Street Brooklyn, NY 11201**

You can also share your concerns online via this page: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/propertytaxreform/contact/testimony-submission.page 

For more info, click here .

**Small Business Jobs Survival Act**

We also wanted you to know that the NYC Small Business Jobs Survival Act, which has been in discussion for many years, will get a hearing at the City Council on October 22 at 1 pm.

Under this proposed law commercial tenants in New York City will have the right to renew their leases for a period of 10 years with a rent set by an independent arbitrator. Both tenants and landlords will have the right to negotiate on their own and come to an agreement on the terms of new leases, or to seek mediation by an arbitrator. If terms are not agreed upon and a request for an arbitration hearing is made, an arbitrator will use an array of factors in setting the rent for a new lease. Commercial landlords will still have the ability to refuse a lease renewal under certain circumstances, but those may also be challenged in an arbitration proceeding, during which the arbitrator will take a different set of factors into consideration.

This can be seen as a positive for merchants, worried about rising rents and losing their space, but it can also be seen as a burden for property owners and a disincentive to renting commercial spaces to small businesses without a long track record of success.

We will be delivering testimony on the proposal, sharing our concerns that the bill doesn’t address a lot of the other struggles that cause the loss of small businesses (and small business jobs) including rising commercial rents, taxes, punitive rules and regulations, online competition and more. We are hoping that this hearing is the beginning of a broader conversation about the health and long-term viability of our small business community.

For more information, click here to review the bill and a summary by the NYC BID Association.