July 20 to July 26, 2026

The reforms break down by sector: 25 for food service and food retail, seven for transportation businesses, five for other retailers, four for child care providers, three for industrial and commercial businesses, two for personal care businesses, three for nonprofits running bingo and games of chance, and six that apply to every business in the city regardless of category.

The package also expands the NYC Business Express Service Team into a concierge-style model, assigning new businesses a single client manager who guides them across permitting, licensing, and inspections rather than routing them separately through each agency. A quarterly small business working group is established to keep examining permitting delays, enforcement consistency, and technology gaps going forward.

The Bill of Rights requirement responds to a specific finding from the administration's roundtables: only 9 percent of businesses surveyed said they had ever actually received the existing bill of rights document during an inspection, despite agencies being required to provide it. Come October, inspectors from DOB, DCWP, DEP, FDNY, DOHMH, DPR, DSNY, and DOT must hand over a physical copy along with information on how to access a digital translation in any of the city's designated languages.

Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice Julie Su and SBS officials framed the package as a direct response to owner feedback gathered since Executive Order 11 in January, which had directed seven agencies to inventory their own fees and civil penalties. State Senator Jose Serrano and business groups including the Bronx and Brooklyn chambers of commerce offered public support at the announcement, while noting more remains to be done on the affordability side.

As of the week's most recent figures, eight people remained hospitalized, 56 had been discharged, and 13 had not required hospitalization. The Health Department reported no new cases diagnosed in six days and no newly reported symptoms in more than ten days at the time of the update, an early signal that the outbreak curve may be turning even as the death toll continued to climb from cases diagnosed earlier in the cluster.

Of the 183 cooling towers at 160 buildings tested overall, 77 towers at 75 buildings screened PCR-positive initially. The subsequent culture testing, which takes up to two weeks to return results and confirms whether bacteria found were actually alive at the time of sampling, came back positive for 34 towers at 33 buildings. All towers with positive results, PCR or culture, have been cleaned and disinfected under DOHMH order.

The distinction between PCR and culture results matters for building owners specifically named on either list. A PCR-positive result triggers an immediate disinfection obligation regardless of the later culture outcome, since the precautionary standard is to treat any genetic trace as a potential risk. A culture-positive result confirms live bacteria was present at the moment of testing, which is the more serious of the two findings but does not by itself confirm that a given tower was the source of any individual's illness.