This article originally appeared on Politico and was authored by Sally Goldenberg.
A ride-hailing vehicle with stickers for Uber and Lyft | Spencer Platt/Getty Images
The de Blasio administration is seeking help with meal deliveries from taxi, Uber and Lyft drivers whose wallets are shrinking as the coronavirus keeps on-the-go New Yorkers hunkered down.
The city’s Taxi & Limousine Commission is forging a partnership with licensed drivers, offering them hourly pay to deliver goods to homebound New Yorkers whose adherence to “social distancing” guidelines are preventing trips to food pantries and soup kitchens.
As POLITICO reported Saturday, more than 100 of these facilities have shuttered amid a shortage of volunteers and increased food costs.
David Greenfield, whose organization Met Council on Jewish Poverty normally supplies 40 pantries with kosher food, predicted a shortage as nonprofits struggle to compete with corporations willing to shell out jacked-up prices. He called it “nothing short of a crisis” on Friday, after learning a 400,000-pound produce delivery scheduled for Tuesday was canceled.
On Monday the TLC reached out to its licensees to seek help. The city is offering drivers an hourly wage of $15 and reimbursements for gas and tolls as it seeks to increase its home deliveries more than eight-fold — from 18,000 meals a day to about 150,000.
"New York City's for-hire vehicle drivers have seen their earnings plummet amid this pandemic. Drivers are ready to step up to help the city in this time of great need,” Brendan Sexton, executive director of the Independent Drivers Guild, said in a prepared statement.
Aloysee Heredia Jarmoszuk, the TLC commissioner, said drivers “are eager and ready to help, and a program potentially feeding over a hundred thousand people in need is a great way to start.”
Meanwhile a group of Albany lawmakers are pressing legislative leaders for increased funding for food pantries amid state budget negotiations.
Sixteen legislators wrote to Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie asking for $5 million for Met Council as part of $25 million in emergency funding for food.
“Without this emergency funding to Met Council and similarly situated organizations, food pantries across the state will shutter, unable to meet challenges in food supply and delivery that will grow more dire with every passing week,” they wrote in the letter.
“I know right now the first priority is hospitals, and so the attention right now has been focused over there, but people are hungry,” Assembly Member Rodneyse Bichotte, who signed the letter, said in an interview.
