By Mary Marvin, Mayor of Bronxville

Sept. 24, 2024: 

To my fellow residents,

This is the letter I am sending out to our food merchants who use the various food delivery services in an effort to form a partnership with the Village to swing the pendulum to a fairer balance between convenience and profit and safety and quality of life issues that currently exist in the Village, especially on weekend evenings.

To Our Fellow Merchants,

Most importantly and to say right upfront, we so value your presence in the Village as it adds to our vitality and health and we deeply appreciate your involvement in many civic activities and the goods and services you so generously donate to the Village and Village organizations. We are so keenly aware that this is a very challenging business climate and you must serve customers in a “new normal” way.

This letter is written to enlist your partnership as a concerted community effort is needed to try to achieve a win-win solution for all who live, work and love the Village. I need your help. I am also reaching out concurrently to our schools and our Bronxville residents especially those who use your delivery services.

As background, for the past three to four months, I have received an unprecedented number of calls and/or emails from residents concerned about the quality of life in the Village related to the delivery commerce.

Needless to say, we have entered a new convenience economy spawned by Covid and in some way shape or form it is here to stay. We understand and realize it is a needed profit center. I am writing to work with you to maximize its benefits and try to minimize the negatives that go along with it that you may not be aware of.

The following is a real life scenario from my vantage point i.e. the ripple effect of some of the orders that you so carefully fulfill.

Many of the gentlemen who pick up at your restaurants have not been vetted by the umbrella employers associated with their services and any potential behavioral missteps may also rest on your shoulders.

These gentlemen also seem not to have a location to take care of their normal bodily needs and as a result, routinely have to use our parks, parking lots, tennis court area and residents’ lawns for normal bodily functions.

When e-bike drivers do not follow traffic rules, New York State law allows a very low threshold of monetary punishment, which often goes unpaid and we essentially have no recourse under current state bail laws to recoup. To compound this, when we meet our statutory requirement to offer a person a proper legal appearance, we often have to incur not tens of dollars but hundreds of dollars to employ various language interpreters.

From another funding perspective, the dollar amount of police overtime we have accrued as a direct result of the delivery services is also in the thousands of dollars. All of these costs rest on the shoulders of the taxpayers who already pay quite a hefty number in our Village.

After conversations with many of our non-food merchants, they have also noticed that as a result of fewer residents picking up their own food orders, there is less pedestrian traffic visiting their stores while waiting for their food or walking home by a nice window display and stopping in. In essence, we are losing needed foot traffic in the business district.

Many of our residents, especially those who live near the downtown, also enjoy an afternoon in the sunshine on our benches visiting with a friend, having a sandwich or just watching the world go by in their beautiful Village, but they find the benches often occupied by very hard working gentlemen who are taking a stretched out nap with their bike securely by their side. Bottom line, the service is working from your end and I know providing a convenience to many villagers, but it is being accomplished at quite a cost.

Rather than pointing fingers, I have always felt anything in our Village is solvable if we work together in a positive way for the common good. I offer the following ideas just to start the conversation as by no means are we at Village Hall experts on this, rather, we are looking from the vantage point of stewards of the Village. 

-Get together with some of your fellow merchants (know this has been done in other Westchester communities) and hire drivers that have been vetted both personally and in terms of the legality of their vehicles and accomplish delivery with this kind of model.

-Lobby the companies you currently use to vet their drivers.

-Be diligent in rating them for behavior and ask them where they have parked their vehicles and have a little more follow through when they close the door to your establishment.

-Offer the drivers sanitary facilities and make that quite known and available.

-Put a minimum dollar amount on an order which was so customary pre-Covid for delivery and credit card use of any kind so that we eliminate the one item orders that not only clog the street but are so environmentally unfriendly.

-Limit the hours of delivery so that there is a break or hiatus in traffic in the village.

-Circumscribe the delivery radius so that perhaps the parameters can be shortened or tightened to alleviate the congestion.

I welcome a meeting with all of you and urge those of you who do not belong to our Chamber of Commerce to do so as I believe an exchange of ideas in this forum could solve many of these issues.

Going forward I am asking our residents to also think about walking to town for food items or if ordering in, minimize multiple deliveries to the same home on the same evening with the goal of limiting the volume of vehicles, as most of the restaurants note it is our residents that create the demand. I ask everyone to look past profit and convenience to restore the Village to an ambience much closer to our pre-Covid pace and atmosphere. It is so worth it.