 So you're going to get a great presentation from Ariel about what she's done, her team has done over the past five years. I can't believe it's been five years since she took the reign of this position, really built out this office. But I wanted to tee it up really quick because I also had a role with the Night Life Office and the Night Life Advisory Board. So as you've probably heard on past panels or conversations, we had advocated in New York City for years and years and years for an Office of Night Life. I remember Paul coming back years ago and talking about Jocelyn in San Francisco and the Entertainment Commission and all these stories and we kept pushing and pushing and pushing. And I guess maybe six years ago, a council member in Brooklyn by the name of Rafael Espinol, we were having a conversation like brought up just casually. We were friendly. I said, this is concept of the Office of Night Life. And he said, okay, I'm going to do a bill. I was like, okay. And we got together, we brought a book menu you heard from and basically drafted this bill or helped draft this bill to create an Office of Night Life. And there was something that was really important to us about not just having the office, but also having some sort of independent advisory board. So the law set off the Office of Night Life, which you'll hear all about from Ariel, but it also set off a separate 14-member advisory board with members appointed by the mayor of the city as well as the speaker of the city council. I was one of those members that was appointed. I was then elected by the board to be the chairperson. And the law required us to do a few different things. One of which was to publish a report and recommendations to the city on what the city could and should be doing to help support the city's nightlife. And this advisory board of 14 members was very diverse. We had people from the industry, you know, people that represented the industry, someone that represented community boards, someone that represented the LGBTQ community, someone that represented a whole list of different stakeholders. When we came to the table at first, you know, certainly there was agreement on some issues, but some other issues, I mean, it was night and day, a lot of disagreement. And we tried to focus on where we could all agree and basically put out a book of recommendations. And I won't get into that whole process right now, but it was very important to do this because it allowed the stakeholders in nightlife to feel like they were being heard. And when we were developing these recommendations, we had public hearings of our own and just like Ariel did, which I'm sure you'll probably hear about as well, to bring in different folks from different sectors of nightlife. So that was the bar, nightclub owners, operators, the workers, residents, you name it. People came, told us what they needed from the city, what was working, what wasn't working, how they could change it and really helped inform our policies that we wanted to see and really how we engaged the industry. And I think it was so important because, you know, a lot of times a law passes or something happens and people just say, that happened, but they don't really feel ownership of it. And I feel like for offices of nightlife to be successful, there needs to be buying from the stakeholders, from the community. And by setting up a separate nightlife advisory board, I think it allows for a lot of that. And the other benefit that it had was getting to work so closely with Ariel and her team and a lot of feedback back and forth. What are you hearing? What are you hearing? What should we be doing? And we were very fortunate because in one sense, yes, we're an advisory board. We're trying to keep the office of nightlife honest. We're going to supervise that. What was so wonderful about it was that she and her team were doing the things that we really wanted to see happen. But on the flip side, if that didn't occur, we also could have kind of pushed back. So I don't want to take too much time, but I just want to say that if you're thinking about having office of nightlife, or you currently do, having an independent advisory board is a really important component. It's a way that you can engage and allow people within the nightlife industry to feel part of the process. They also then have the ability to work with the actual people in the office to help advise them, get feedback, and make sure that you're really going out and achieving your mission. And after five years, as I said over and over again, Ariel is going to be deeply missed. We're really interested to see who the next person is that comes into this role, how they are going to not only take the initiatives that Ariel and her team have created and keep them in motion and keep them going, but also how are they going to imagine the office? What is their vision for the office? So with that said, Ariel, come up on the stage. Hello, brother. So these are the reports that you can get online. A lot of what I'm going to share with you today was all published in this 160-page pamphlet that sort of detailed how the office was created, how we defined our priorities, how we chose the programs that we did, navigated the pandemic, and over 23 recommendations for the future. And then we have this updated report of some of the follow-through on some of those recommendations. And there'll be another report as it's legislatively mandated that we come up with an annual report to share with the world what we're doing. Let's see. It's been a minute since I gave this presentation, but I'm really grateful for the opportunity, again, in my last weekend, of be able to give you a summary in a sense of what this office has done in the time that I had here over five years. And it's, you know, it was only two years in from creating this office from scratch that the pandemic hit, which was, you know, a curve. But we stayed on track. So speaking of staying on track, I will go with my slides. So, yeah, as Andrew was saying, this office was really years and years and years in the making. The first one really that hit the European or the global stage was in Amsterdam. Obviously Jim and R.H.I. has been doing work for 40 years talking about it. But it wasn't until 2017 that through this conversation that Andrew's talking about and a lot of work from a grassroots level and the alliance that this, the New York City decided that, yeah, it's time. The rest of the world has tried this experiment and New York City deserves this office of nightlife. So in 2018, Rafael Espinal wrote the bill and Bill de Blasio, our mayor at the time, signed it and created New York's first ever office of nightlife. So, I'm really proud of our logo, by the way. I thought it was a really huge accomplishment to have this, you know, sort of uptight New York City government, you know, persona, create this really cool disco dance light logo. I think it really helped us to communicate to the industry, right, that they're being seen, that they're going to be heard after what we've learned from the Gation era. So many decades of not being understood and not seen and being seen as a criminal entity. This was the beacon of light that the city respects you, sees you and is dedicating an office specifically for you. And so, this is Rafael Espinal, Bill and Andrew signing before I was even appointed. And then ultimately, after an exhaustive search, a former bar owner, the number one noisiest bar in New York, was able to somehow out of hundreds of applicants or more be chosen to represent this industry and this city. And it was really, I think, not only a relief for me, but for the industry itself and the city, there was a lot of fear, who is this person going to be? Is it going to be somebody who understands us, that have been through it? Is it going to be an enforcer? So again, it was another signal to the industry that this was something that was truly going to be beneficial. So even though I brought, you know, a lifetime of experience, the first thing that we decided was important to do was to do a five borough listening tour, listening and learning tour. But, you know, you might not see it, but I said, you know, what can the office of nightlife do for you? So we invited owners, workers, performers, residents, nimbies, all into one room. I always thought I was insane that we would need something, you know, a bomb sniffing dog to go through the place that it would be war. But we chose really special rooms, synagogues, town hall, beautiful rooms that demanded respect, that demanded decorum. We had playlists to set the tone. And I got up there, not alone. You can see in this little picture there, I brought the New York State Liquor Authority, the Police Department, Fire, Health, all these regulatory enforcement agencies that have historically been adversarial, not to say anything, but to listen. And because I wanted them to feel it, like, you know, in real life, what these people have been going through. And at a certain point I was just like, listen, we all know what the complaints are. We've all been complaining about everything for years. This is a now what moment. When an office of nightlife is created, it's a now what moment. And so we just had them tell us what are their top priorities. Improving quality of life, streamlining, everybody's just telling us what their issues were. So the listening tour, people want to be heard, let's hear them. But we already know what the problems are, don't we? The next thing that we did in the office was to create an economic impact study. A lot of people in the industry know what the cultural value is, the social value is. But not everybody cares about that. And those people that don't care about that are the ones whose attention and support you need. And those people care about money. And they want to know, is New York a $35.1 billion industry that with over 25,000 licensed establishments in New York? These are pre-pandemic numbers, but we're still, I think, almost at that place now where we've recovered to it. Almost $700 million in tax revenue, paying for the police, paying for the fire department. And so these were really important numbers to put, supporting almost 300,000 jobs. These are important numbers to put out there for people in government and also naysayers to understand. It's not just about a good time, it's about an economic driver. So after the listening tour and creating the economic impact study, we started to get to work and look to other cities around the world. Looked at what we learned from the listening tour, from my own personal experience. And we took this vast industry with multitudes of problems and somehow boiled it down into four buckets. And so first was listening to the industry. We need to support businesses, help them navigate through bureaucracy. Give them a non-enforced in touch point that is their holding hand to get them through so that they aren't going to problem with the police department. They don't have to call the police department. The other one we heard of course was from the neighbors and around quality of life issues. But it wasn't just a neighbor problem, it was also the venues. The driving force of enforcement is complaints. But it's also not just a venue problem or a neighbor problem. It's also elected officials who get calls from their constituents about the person who's complaining about the venue. And then it's the police department's problem and then it's everybody's problem. So it's really resolving how to manage quality of life issues in a non-enforcement way is a mutually beneficial solution, not just for the neighbor. And then of course a bucket that just grew and grew and grew. You know, nightlife spaces are places where people can look out for each other. I think it was Howie from New Orleans that said, you know, it's the solution, not the problem to a lot of the issues that, oh there it is, how about that? That, you know, these are places where people can learn, learn from each other, where we can teach, where we can raise consciousness and awareness. And so all a multitude of harm reduction techniques and webinars and programs that we've developed to ensure a safer space. What we learned is there's no such thing as a safe place, but safer spaces. And so to keep our eye on that. And so the next slide is, yes, these are improvements that we've developed based on these buckets. Well there was a fourth bucket that is Elevate Nightlife, right, as an economic and cultural asset. I always think it should really actually be the first one because the first thing to do is to reframe a framed industry. To begin to see it as an asset and not a liability because you can't come up with any good solution for any problem. If you don't care about it, if you don't see it as an asset, if it's a problem, you're only going to want to restrict it, enforce it and hold it down. You're not going to want to find the creative, non-enforcement supportive solution. So that's the first thing and the foundational thing that has to continue for every office of nightlife. And especially for this one in New York is to from within re-educate every single city agency about how they look at this industry. And so with that said, those same people, multi-agency city and state that was at the listening tour, we reconvened them and more. Almost 20 different city and state agencies, some enforcement, some not. We met every six weeks for five years with our MASH approach, which stands for multi-agency support for hospitality. And yes, it is a swipe at March, which is the multi-agency response to community hotspots. So this is our answer to March is MASH, a MASH unit. And we sat around pre-pandemic in person and after and during the pandemic without fail online and still. There's up to 30 people in this room every six weeks, not just police, fire, health, state, but cultural affairs. The mayor's office to end gender-based and violence, thank you. And they have turned to be our partners, not just our thought partners, our partners in personal one-on-one case management. So it's about macro solutions, right? How do we change it systemically, but also helping on a micro level, one-on-one case work, or hand-holding, resolving issues so that people aren't waiting in the dark for weeks, months, not knowing where they stand with a ticket or a permit or something like that. Giving them an answer. Sometimes just knowing you have to wait for six months is less painful than waiting for six months not knowing how long it's going to take. But what I learned, especially now at the end of this five years and when I said goodbye to this amazing group, the feedback was you truly helped us change the way we see this industry. And that was all I needed to hear, that this was exactly the right thing. It's about humanizing this industry and expressing what it goes through. So the march. Most of these march operations, which if you were here this morning and heard from our incredible chief, the department, which is we are still in the process of evolving our way out of that. But back in the day, you would get a march and you didn't know when it was going to happen, how it was going to happen, why it happened. There was no warning. There was no, it just showed up at your door and you're like, did you know you had 300 complaints? Well, no, sir, I did not. And so we through legislation were able to achieve a 30 day warning letter that notified them, that notified them to contact the office of nightlife to help resolve the issues before to help avoid a march. But also we started, we were, because of this multi-agency relationship, we were given the trust to create a quarterly, annual, bi-annual report, a transparency report. Because it's multi-agency. It's not a central agency really. So there was no central reporting. We didn't know how many were being taken place every month. What neighborhoods, is it really disproportionate against black and brown businesses and communities? And we need to be able to prove that. And this data is what's actually helping us to change the minds of the city and the police department to actually find better and more fair enforcement. Okay, so this is a fun slide. So again, most enforcement is complaint driven. And so, you know, I'd like to say back in the day before 3-1-1, you would go down with a bat and come up with a bottle of wine. Right? Nobody called the cops. That was not an option. Right? You go down and you deal with it. And the creation of 3-1-1, where it might be great for many things, for complaints against the hospitality industry, it is not productive. You're literally taking out the neighborly relation of a neighborly problem. And not only that, they created it in an anonymous way, which subconsciously communicates to the complainant that you have something to fear, that you are safer, not showing who you are and your name. And then you can call 300 times, which tells the police and the city and the state that you have somehow 300 complainants when it's one person on speed dial who is anonymous. And so, that's not going to work. So we created, from day one, even at our five borough listening tour, we had outside the center, no, the Peace Institute. In New York State, there is some law that says you have to have free mediation. We brought them in and in every borough and said, think about this as a solution. I wound up personally getting trained as a mediator. I piled in the program with the House of Yes, actually, and many others to see, does this work or am I crazy? And it worked. And so, during the pandemic, we wound up being able to partner with Oath, the Office of Arbitration Trials and Hearings, and realize that they have a center for creative conflict resolution in the government. But it wasn't public facing. It's only for within government issues. I went to the commissioner. She thought this was a great idea. She turned her whole program around. Public facing did not cost us a dime, still doesn't. And we created a program called MEND. It stands for Mediating Establishment Neighborhood Disputes. We have fun bus shelters, and it's interesting because the police department are the ones that are actually our partners. The Office of Department of Environmental Protection, when they get a complaint, they send out a letter to the complaint and said, would you like to MEND? When you call 311 now or go to the 311 app or their website, it says complain, or would you like to mediate? And so, this is really an educational process. We are re-educating people on how to complain. But over 83% of people that choose to MEND, do. And so, the statistics are in our favor. So more quality of life stuff. This is something I learned in Amsterdam when you go into the Red Light District. It says people live here. There are signs. It's a public etiquette campaign. Your night out is someone else's night in. Socialize responsibly. It's okay to use your inside voice outside. Communicating personal responsibility for the actual patrons. Why is all this responsibility always on the owner? And not the people. They're acting like maniacs outside. They also need to have personal responsibility. Another program under our harm reduction umbrella. This was obviously anyone who works in night life in hospitality knows this is an extremely difficult business. You don't even get to bed until the sun is rising. Someone said, lunch is at 1pm. You deserve a good meal but you're probably having pizza. It's a lot of stress being in a dark room. Sometimes fights break out. There's drama. It's stressful. And a lot of people that work at night, sometimes they're even like those people that just don't really do well during the day. The misfits of the world. The beautiful misfits of the world. And so we knew that having a mental health program dedicated to this industry was important and only exacerbated during the pandemic where we saw anxiety, suicidal tendencies, relapse. And so we created Elevate. This is Elevate Nightlife Mental Health Initiative, but we have since expanded it to nightlife mental health and well-being, including physical well-being and spiritual. Again, an entirely free program because we partner with the Department of Health, health in hospitals, music cares. I think it's important to understand that you don't need a multi-million dollar budget because in government there are so many resources that are funded, but as a nightlife office, your job is to see where the resources are and put beer goggles on. And say, I want to partner with you and we're going to reframe this and market this for us, for this industry. All you need is a great, brilliant graphic designer and writer and team like I do in Francesca and José because it was just us three. It looks like a million people in a million dollars and it's just these three people and no money. So perception is everything and resources and access to that and creative thinking and creative problem solving. That's what this is. It's not rocket science. Okay, so as many of you may know, some of you may not know, in New York, many parts of the country, there's a fentanyl. They call it overdose crisis. I call it poisoning. Overdose, I think, is the wrong language. It implies somehow someone took too much of something. But with fentanyl, you don't know you're taking it. It's a micro sand amount and you're dead. And so I'm personally changing it as a one woman crusade to fentanyl poisoning. However, either way, semantics. We understand that this is happening anywhere and everywhere, but we had to, like everything else, see our nightlife spaces as places where people can look out for each other. But being careful not to restigmatize the industry as the place where drug overdoses and bad things happen, right? You have to be very careful when you are advocating for any harm reduction, whether it be sexual assault and bystander training on the dance floor or drug overdose awareness or drug misuse or depression. We're just here to help educate our workers and our patrons about issues that happen in all walks of life and in all businesses. And yes, in social settings, people do tend to imbibe in drugs and alcohol, and that's okay as long as we help them be safe about it. So we created the NARCAN Behind Every Bar campaign for free in partnership with the Department of Health who is funded to have free training and free NARCAN kits, and well, they're getting codified into law with Council Member Chio-Se. Now you can get them in the CVS, but we give them for free and we give them training, and so if you're in a bar and you happen to do a bump in the bathroom and you come out and you go down, that staff knows how to bring you back. And so we have a lot of programs and a lot of different initiatives and webinars that we created, but also that our partners in the city and state and even with community-based organizations are creating and with webinars in Zoom, it's endless. So we created another umbrella for all our umbrellas called Night School, and it stands for we love an acronym, if you haven't noticed, Night Life Industry Training and Education, or a acronym, Francesca, is really the brilliant line behind most of these and our graphics. And I think it's worth noting the graphics we use are cool. They're nightlife, they're creative, they, you know, are something you can trust if you're not in gunner. So, bam, here we have three months, and you can see they go from rat mitigation strategies, applying for loans and grants, cannabis, NYC workshops, human trafficking, this is, people who work in Night Life should be aware that there might be somebody, there might be trafficking, how do you, how do you even recognize that? What do you do when you recognize that? Minority and Women Own Business Enterprise Certification, NARCAN, you know, it's endless because your governments have so many incredible programs that you, as the hospitalities are, can harness and just share specifically to your owners, workers, performers and patrons. Yeah, and here's some of the active shooter preparedness training with Homeland Security, and financial management for nightlife workers, party safer, bystander training. So, I guess, you know, you kind of have to then take a pause and talk about COVID, because it happened for a really long time, and, bye, and, you know, everyone's like, wow, so you must have had nothing to do, since there was no nightlife. And, actually, busier than ever, trying to keep the whole industry in city from falling off a cliff, but everyone's like, well, everything must have changed, I mean, how do you adjust? I mean, it did change, but our mandate and our purpose and the reason why this office was created was exactly for this. It wasn't like we have to morph into some, yes, we morphed into crisis management, which, you know, as a former bar owner, we live in on a daily basis, not of epic global proportions, but this is, that's the mentality. And so, we fulfilled our mandate to be a dedicated liaison between the government and the industry to make sure they have the resources and support, but also that they are being heard, and that they have a seat at the table where decisions are being made. And that's true every day, with or without a pandemic, but especially during a pandemic. We did a survey within the first week or two with almost 12,000 participants that showed a 95% drop off everything, overnight. Not that we needed a chart to show us or to prove that, but we did it anyway, just in case anybody was wondering. We held over 40 virtual town halls with federal, state, and city agencies that entertained, I guess is the wrong word, 20,000 participants to get information, sometimes multiple times a week for workers, owners, and patrons, department of health, transportation, all the pivoting. If you lived in New York, you may have seen this brilliant, it's up to you New York in every single window, you know, really taking this incredible opportunity to be in the mayor's office to create city-wide campaigns, you know, it was incredible to see that. We also did a what to expect when you're being inspected in plain language because there were so many different kinds of agencies and nobody even knew what to expect, and it was all this crazy state language. Takeout and hangout, all that stuff. Toolkits with the hospitality alliance and within the mayor's office. We also had a seat at the table and helping to, you know, inform the open restaurant program to make sure that it wasn't, you know, nonsensical. We had the alliance on the outside of government. We were on the inside of government working together, pushing in the same direction on this and so many other things, sort of verifying each other's perspective. And it's going to be permanent. I mean, it's a messy process, but it's going to happen. It's happening. So our recommendations for the future, you know, again, in this report develop a streamlined one-stop shop process, which is now in the process of happening with Mayor Adams. Launch Night School did that. Evaluate the complaint process. Still doing that. I feel like there should be a list of people that abuse the system. If you call 311 a thousand times, you should have a list. You still have to show up for health or for safety, but they should be brought down at night. So for the next person in my role, I would like them to do that. So it's just good to have these. Community board process, we've heard about this. It's a mess. Needs fixing. That's Amsterdam, Red Light District, non-enforcing police, civilians walking around, having these people walking around the Red Light District with walkie-talkies to tell the cops if there's a problem. Just tell them, please don't piss there. Please keep your voice down. A shush patrol. You don't need, you know, if there are cops that should be out there, you know, helping. True crime. This is a very interesting model that they came up with that I feel like to see implemented. House of Yes, you know, these are issues around consent, bringing around, you know, conscious behavior, bringing the idea of higher expectations and communication on personal conduct and consequences in venues. Oh, and then another thing that is undone or that is in the process is changing the dancing restrictions of dancing on the zoning law. It's unfinished business of the cabaret law. It used to be illegal to dance in New York without a license. It's a much longer story, but right before this office was created that was reformed or repealed. There's some unfinished business in the zoning law. So the longer you're in office, you get to dig deeper and go into the text and into the systemic issues. And this is happening. This is in the process. The new commissioner of city planning, the alliance, mayor's office, it's going to happen. I'd like to see 24-hour districts, 24-hour licenses in perhaps Times Square. We're the city that never sleeps. Yeah, we have a bedtime. It doesn't make sense to me. So that's a unfinished business. And there's a lot of unfinished business, but this is as far as I got in five years. How do you take questions? Yes? The red team that you have. The red team, the ambassadors. What is the liability to the city for having them or to volunteer? Because I can imagine, you know, somebody used to walk and talk and say, I'm trying to say, go that often, punch people in the face. How do you manage those? Well, I mean, we haven't fully implemented it. This is something that is an intention. However, we've explored that. There are similar programs, like block by block. Yeah, there's a training process. You don't just take any NIMBY off the street and say, you know, you're the one in charge. There's betting. There's training. There's guidelines. There's accountability. There's a supervisor. And they are also in touch with a point person in the precinct. So really, it's really about being able to say, something's brewing here. We need backup. Or, you know, be able to assess, is this really just about, sometimes it's really just about clocking people. And say, when they're walking within that area, say, hello, welcome to the Lower East Side. Would you like a wristband that says I'd love the Lower East Side? Just a reminder, people live here. They can say F off if they want to. But now they know someone knows who they are, and they've been seen, and they're not anonymous anymore. It's a psychological experience. And then just also having extra eyes, you know, on the street that can... Kind of like a guardian angel. Yeah. Now that's a liability. Except for less life. Exactly. But something like that, but less rogue. Yes? If you could go back in time, in the center of the office, or implementation of any of these programs, would you go back and do anything different? Not that you made a mistake, because it didn't exist. So you created a roadmap. I'm curious if you could go back and either give something a certain priority, or in a setup, or whatever it is. Would you change anything based on those five years or even just in the first year? Is it arrogant to say I'm really happy with the way things turned out? I mean, I wish we had more money. I wish we had more staff. I wish, you know, things that maybe weren't always in my control. But I feel pretty good. You know, I'm not in a place where I have a very deep regret right now. Maybe in a few months in retrospect, I'll be good. Damn. But honestly, like the best thing I did was hire Jose and Francesca. You know, having a team, especially when you have this much of a heavy lift, to have an intense level of competency and brilliance and creativity. And to have a shared amount of skill where we're never stepping on each other's toes and that each person basically has the job and the ability of 10. You know, that was my best move. Was those two. Anyone? Well, it's legislatively created in his law. I think we feel pretty safe under this mayor. He's the nightlife mayor himself. He goes out more than all of us. I hear people. Oh, I saw your mayor at 4am. And then he's out. He's on time at eight. It is, I think, because of the how loud this office has been and how necessary it's been, especially through the pandemic. The pandemic, as horrible as it was, was really, we couldn't have asked for something better to demonstrate how vital this industry is and how vital this office is. And there are always be organizations like the hospitality alliance and others that help create it that will demand that it stays. And I don't know if the next person will be as sort of relentless or, you know, as loud in the sense as I am. But hopefully my role is the first was to be sort of a little bit more aggressive and they can just do the work without all the necessity for the extra gravitas to demand the respect of the office. But there will always be watchdogs on this. The industry will always expect, I hope, and hold it accountable and the city accountable.