New York City Council Passes Controversial Hotel Licensing Bill

New York City hotels will need to obtain licenses starting in May.

The City Council on Wednesday approved a bill requiring hotels to meet certain safety and sanitation standards to secure a license, including continuous staffing at front desks and panic buttons for core employees entering occupied guest rooms. Licenses will need to be renewed every two years.

“There are 769 hotels in New York City right now, they have been the subject of 39 murders and over 14,000 criminal complaints to the NYPD,” Julie Menin, the bill’s prime sponsor, said before the vote. “This is an incredibly important public safety bill…but at the same time, it’s also a worker protection bill.”

The 39 murders, however, occurred over 15 years, and not all were inside hotels. After Menin proposed the bill in July, hotel operators feared it was unfairly portraying their establishments as unsafe just as they had recovered from the pandemic.

But the greater uproar was about staffing provisions in the bill, which critics said were designed to boost the hotel workers union by driving up costs at nonunion hotels.

Nonunion hotels, prevented by the law from hiring subcontractors and facing other new expenses, would likely have had to raise their prices, eroding their cost advantage.

After months of discussions and revisions, Menin reached an agreement with the hotel workers union and operators last week to exempt hotels with fewer than 100 rooms from the core staffing provisions in the bill.

Menin said the change was made after conversations with the Hotel Association of New York City and hearing from small hotel operators about the importance of seasonal hiring. But some small hotel owners are still unhappy.

“The bill’s sponsors have once again put powerful special interests and their own political ambitions ahead of the needs of their constituents by rushing this measure through without any meaningful conversations with the small, independent hotel operators who will be most impacted,” the NYC Minority Hotel Association, a group formed to oppose the bill, said in a statement.

Menin had already come to terms with the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, which represents union workers, and the Hotel Association to allow hotels to subcontract work that requires “highly technical skills.” For example, they would be allowed to subcontract engineers rather than hiring them as employees.

HANYC president and CEO Vijay Dandapani said the law “will create a fair and practical standard for hotels that will protect both our industry and employees.”

The revised bill allows licenses to be transferred and makes clear that they will not be revoked because of service disruptions, such as an employee not showing up to cover the front desk. It also excludes real estate investment trusts.

The bill exposed a 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, which 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. The Hotel Association of New York City essentially represents owners and operators of large, union-staffed hotels.

“From the start, this rushed and haphazard legislative process has been in service of one goal: to deliver a single, special-interest victory at the expense of small and minority-owned businesses,” AHLA interim president and CEO Kevin Carey said in a statement. “This bill will do material damage to the businesses and the tax revenue that hotels generate for the city’s economy and result in higher costs for travelers.”

Union leaders applauded the vote. Rich Maroko, president of the union, said, “By passing the Safe Hotels Act, we will have licensing and regulations, as many other major cities do, that ensure the city has the enforcement tools it needs to protect and improve the experience of tens of millions of guests and tens of thousands of workers.”

Mayor Eric Adams must still sign the bill into law.