Federal judge dismisses outdoor dining lawsuit from North End restaurants

A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit from North End restaurant owners and the neighborhood’s chamber of commerce that alleged Mayor Michelle Wu unfairly targeted the businesses with punishing restrictions on outdoor dining in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a 33-page ruling handed down Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Leo Sorokin acknowledged that the businesses were “understandably upset” with a $7,500 fee they had to cough up in 2022 for outdoor dining and then an on-street ban in the North End in 2023 and 2024.

But Sorokin said their “unhappiness … cannot alone give rise to a cause of action against the city and unlock the doors of discovery in federal court.”

“To accomplish that, plaintiffs must state a claim that the city’s policy violates the law under the standards applicable to all plaintiffs in all civil cases. This they have not done,” Sorokin wrote in the decision.

An attorney representing the 21 North End restaurants and the neighborhood’s chamber of commerce did not immediately return a request for comment.

In a statement, Mayor Michelle Wu said “we’re glad this is resolved and wish everyone a happy holiday season.”

In a court filing from May, the restaurants and business group argued the Wu administration required them to “pay steep fees” to participate in the outdoor dining program in 2022 while allowing all other restaurants in the city to do so for free.

The businesses argued that Wu knew Italian Americans “would bear the brunt of the financial burden of the participation fees, as most of North End restaurants are Italian restaurants.”

“The city’s decision to make the North End alone pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to the city to participate in a citywide remedial plan was to promote the mayor’s political agenda of economic justice based on equity as opposed to equal treatment of similarly situated Boston businesses,” the businesses said in their lawsuit.

Lawyers for the restaurants said city officials banned the on-street outdoor dining program in the North End in 2023 “as a vindictive, retaliatory measure against the North End restaurants for their decision to file suit seeking redress of grievances regarding the 2022 fees.”

“The 2022 fees and 2023-24 on-street bans were intentional attempts by the city to achieve economic rebalancing by redistributing outdoor dining revenue across the city at the expense of the long-established and ‘expensive, disruptive, and white’ Italian-American restaurants in the North End,” the restaurants and chamber of commerce argued in their lawsuit.

But city attorneys said those claims “fail” because the 2022, 2023, and 2024 outdoor dining programs treated all restaurants in the North End the same and were “rationally related to a legitimate government purpose.”

The Wu administration also said the North End restaurants as a group were not entitled to “heightened scrutiny” by the courts.

“Restaurants fail to meet the threshold requirement of plausibly alleging that the North End is similarly situated to other neighborhoods for outdoor dining. Further, the city’s policies were rationally related to the legitimate end of mitigating the negative impacts of outdoor dining as reported by the residents of the North End,” city attorneys said in an April court filing.

While the Wu administration banned on-street dining in the North End, the city still issued permits for “compliant sidewalk patios” in 2023 and 2024.

The restaurants asked a judge to award them the money they lost because of the fees to operate outdoor dining in 2022 and the cash they missed out on because of the on-street dining bans in 2023 and 2024, according to an April court filing.

The group also wanted a permanent injunction requiring city officials “to accept future outdoor dining applications from North End restaurants and process them in the same manner as other applications submitted by restaurants in other areas of the City,” the court filing said.

Sorokin, the federal judge, said the “wisdom” in amending or banning on-street dining “is fundamentally a policy judgment ordinarily entrusted to elected officials in our democratic society, not to federal judges.”

But, Sorokin said, elected officials do not possess “unbridled authority” when making those decisions. Politicians are bound by and must operate within the limits established by the United States Constitution and state and federal laws, Sorokin said.

In this instance, Sorokin said, Wu’s decisions “fall squarely within those legal parameters for a number of reasons.”.

“First, the fees and eventual termination of on-street dining do not infringe upon an express or fundamental constitutional right, such as free speech or the free exercise of religion. Second, Plaintiffs have not stated a colorable claim that they were singled out based upon their race, ethnicity, or national origin,” Sorokin said in the ruling dismissing the federal lawsuit.

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/heEzdoT