Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman is invoking a 150-year-old clause in the New York State Constitution to block Mayor Zohran Mamdani's $70 million taxpayer-funded grocery store plan — the sharpest legal challenge yet to a scheme that would force working-class bodega owners to subsidize their own competition.
The stakes are plain: if Mamdani's government stores survive, every independent grocer in the five boroughs faces a competitor backed by bottomless public dollars and zero overhead. That is not competition; it is market rigging, and it is exactly the kind of government overreach the founders warned about when they entrusted citizens with a Constitution to bind the state.
Blakeman, a Republican candidate for governor, points to the state's "Gift and Loan Clause," a Reconstruction-era provision that bars municipalities from giving or lending public money to private entities and mandates that public funds serve a genuine public purpose. The law was written to stop local governments from funneling tax dollars to favored railroad barons. Now it may be the last line of defense against a city that wants to open and operate its own supermarkets.
"This unconstitutional subsidy poses a direct threat to long-standing, tax-paying businesses, risking widespread closures and job losses within the community," Blakeman told the New York Post. "We are literally forcing neighborhood grocers to fund their own demise."
Mamdani's plan would open a city-owned supermarket in each borough, run by select private companies, using public funds to undercut private competitors on price. Blakeman argues that violates the Gift and Loan Clause because it diverts taxpayer money to favored operators and destroys the private market rather than serving a legitimate public benefit.
Legal experts are skeptical the challenge holds. Former state appellate judge James M. McGuire told the Post that Blakeman "may have a difficult time" prevailing against Court of Appeals precedents. Mamdani's team will almost certainly argue that cheaper groceries qualify as a public benefit. The Mayor's Office declined to comment.
Gov. Kathy Hochul, who endorsed Mamdani for mayor, offered a tepid rebuke at a 2025 Hamptons breakfast — "I favor free enterprise" — then went silent. Gristedes CEO John Catsimatidis, who said he was unfamiliar with the constitutional clause, urged "common sense" and suggested Mamdani simply subsidize bulk purchases of staples if he wants lower prices.
The grocery fight is not Mamdani's only brush with controversy over whose interests his City Hall serves. Breitbart reported this week that Italian Americans are demanding an apology after the mayor's office published a "New York City Immigrant Enclaves" map that highlighted Little Africa, Little Poland, and Little Palestine — but erased Little Italy entirely. The Italian American Civil Rights League called it "cultural erasure," noting that Italian immigrants built the city's infrastructure. Writer Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt observed that Jewish neighborhoods were also conspicuously absent from the map.
A mayor who erases the communities that built New York while building government stores to replace the businesses that feed it is not solving problems — he is consolidating power. The Constitution gives New Yorkers a tool to stop him. The question is whether the courts will let them use it.
