The lawsuit, filed in Manhattan Supreme Court, alleges the city has not done its due diligence studying the impacts of the plan to run five municipally operated grocery stores in violation of state law.
The chair of the Multicultural Business Coalition (MBC), the nonprofit that formed in May and filed the lawsuit on Aug. 24, told amNewYork that it is one prong of a political project to fight against New York’s Democratic Socialist of America (DSA)-affiliated political leaders.
In the legal complaint, the MBC claims that the city has not properly vetted the plan to build a City-owned grocery store in each borough — a prominent campaign promise from Mamdani, a DSA member — through necessary environmental or community reviews.
The mayor responded on Monday that he believed his plan would stand up in court.
“I continue to be fully confident in both the legality and the importance of our initiative to deliver five City-run grocery stores, one in each borough, to the people of our city,” Mandani told members of the press. “We are talking about a reflection of a cost-of-living crisis that has seen grocery prices increase by about 30% over the last few years.”
Grocery store owners feel competition from city will harm them
The concern raised in the lawsuit is that minority grocery store and bodega owners would struggle to compete with the publicly subsidized grocery store prices and would be at risk of financial losses or business closures.
Asked what he would do to help bodega owners, the mayor said that he would identify savings through the city task force aimed at cutting bureaucratic red tape.
Frank Garcia, the chair of the MBC, said that he could in theory support a city-run grocery store if his commercial association were a part of the planning, but he claimed that the mayor and his administration had refused to sit down with him.
In the same interview, Garcia expressed his opposition to other policies of Mamdani’s, like his support of the City Council’s Delivery Protection Act, a policy designed to force Amazon to restructure its subcontractor delivery model.
Garcia, who said he has led the state Coalition of Hispanic Chambers of Commerce for 20 years, helped organize the MBC as a so-called 501(c)(4) nonprofit so that they can lobby and avoid requirements around donor disclosure.
“We’re going to have a fight against this mayor. Now we’re learning from the unions, and we’re going to fight,” Garcia said, adding that the coalition represents around 50 different ethnic chambers of commerce.
Garcia told the Post in May, shortly after the organization formed, that it was expecting a $1 million donation. However, as of late August, that donation hadn’t seemed to have materialized.
Garcia said that the group went $50,000 into debt to pay the legal cost of filing its most recent lawsuit, and was still finalizing the details of who would represent the legal effort going forward — details he hoped to announce at a press conference later this week.
“We’re focusing on all the DSA on candidates,” Garcia said. “That’s going to be part of and we’re asking corporate America to support us on this.”