The head of the city’s Department of Consumer Affairs, Gretchen Dykstra, has had a busy time at the complaint window. Small-business people have accused her of sending out agents to stage a giant ticketing blitz, for example, while consumers grouse about illegal sidewalk cafes. In a way, Ms. Dykstra’s job requires the prowess of a cat herder: From getting toy guns off the streets to impounding unlicensed contractors’ trucks, she is seeking, in her words, “to establish a marketplace where consumers are safe and honest businesses thrive.” The New York Sun’s City Hall bureau chief, Dina Temple-Raston sat down with the commissioner to discuss the activities of her department and how they have changed since Mayor Bloomberg took office.

Q: There has been talk about a ticketing blitz, that you are targeting small sidewalk fruit and vegetable stands and writing tickets to raise money. Your response?

A: All this talk assumes that the only way an agency like this produces revenues is by writing more tickets. We don’t. We increased our revenues by enhancing and improving our internal systems. For instance, we inherited a collections division that was not automated. The folks were barely computer literate.

There were no protocols for dunning notices. If you owed us a fine, we wouldn’t be following you. It was a mess. We have completely restructured that division. Now it is completely automated and just won a citywide award for the best use of technology for revenue reasons, and we got through a huge backlog. In fact, there were slightly fewer violations written last year than the year prior to that.

So when they look at your revenue numbers in your annual report and say, “Aha, they are writing more tickets …”?

That’s wrong and they know better. Let’s not stop there – let’s look at adjudication. We inherited a backlog of 1,800 cases. That is a big backlog when we are improving and enhancing enforcement by cross-training your officers and getting them to do comprehensive inspections, instead of just getting them to go out upon complaint. So adjudication is getting in more cases because our enforcement is so organized. We have gotten rid of that backlog. How did we do it? We created templates for the cases, we instituted a mandatory settlement conference so if you get a violation – let’s say you sold tobacco unlicensed – before you see an administrative judge, we say, “Come have a settlement conference,” and you can pay that fine at less than what you would have to pay if you saw an administrative judge and were found guilty. That has freed up judges and got through the backlog, and we collected those fines.

What else has changed here?

For the first time, as soon as we got here, we thought we should have a mission statement. A big piece of it is a regulatory piece. And in our annual report it says it: Works to establish a marketplace that consumers can trust and in which honest businesses can thrive. You have to assume that if an honest business is going to thrive, then the consumers themselves will thrive. Because we license 55 different businesses in many ways, the heart of what we do is a licensing function. It is where we have leverage over business breaking the rules. It is not all that we do. We also enforce the consumer-protection laws. That is the heart of what we do: protecting consumers while working with businesses. You get a license from us, we have an enforcement division that makes sure you are living up to licensing laws and consumer-protection laws. If you get a fine, you can challenge that fine in our adjudication tribunal or actually see an administrative judge. And then Collections works with each of those divisions.

How do we draw the line to show your sphere of influence in licensing?

We cover everything from tobacco licenses to sidewalk cafes to home-improvement contractors and tow-truck operators. One of the things we’ve been trying to do is make sure we all know why there is a license law. If you think about home-improvement contractors or tow-truck operators, they are dealing with very major possessions of consumers, so we actually do criminal background checks on them. We want to make sure the person who is working in your house is not in fact a burglar, or the guy who is picking up your truck when it is stranded is not in fact a car thief.

In the past, it seemed like DCA was putting out fires when they flared. You have said this DCA is different. How so?

Now what we are doing is focusing intently and deeply on a handful of areas. Let’s take home-improvement contractors. There are anywhere from 10,000 to 12,000 home-improvement contractors in New York. … When we started, there were about 5,000 licensed home-improvement contractors. We actually have a home-improvement trust fund, where, if a consumer uses someone who goes belly up or disappears, they can come to us and we will try to track down that home-improvement contractor, try to get him to pay what he owes or finish the work or what have you. But if we can’t find him, we can pay the consumer up to $15,000 against what they lost. But that is only if they have used a licensed contractor. It is a reimbursement that is paid for contractors when they get their licenses. Home-improvement has always been a top complaint getter at DCA, but what we did is say that we’re going to concentrate on it and we’re not going to leave it.

We can seize trucks of unlicensed home-improvement contractors. That wasn’t being done very much. We’ve seized 215 trucks this calendar year [2004], and last year it was 50. … They can’t get their trucks back until they pay their confiscation fee and promise to get licensed. … That’s an example how enforcement can help drive people to the licensing division.

Recently, there was a big dustup over a sidewalk cafe that was going to go across from Ron Perelman’s Upper East Side townhouse. Sidewalk cafes are part of your purview. … What have you done to change that system?

For years, the Department of Consumer Affairs licensed sidewalk cafes, but there were seven agencies that were involved with that licensing process. I hadn’t been here more than two months … when I started getting calls from community boards saying you’re going to start gearing up for enforcement on sidewalk cafes and we expect to see you here, we have so many unlicensed sidewalk cafes. … Restaurants, simultaneously, were calling, saying DCA licenses sidewalks and my application has been over there for two years. We looked around and sure enough, it was taking on average 465 days to get a sidewalk cafe license. It was a bureaucratic nightmare. It forced restaurants to be unlicensed, which then drove the communities insane. We set about to simplify it.

In the old laws, what our inspectors would do is they would go out and see your sidewalk cafe, you weren’t licensed, and we would confiscate your chairs and tables. In June the year that I started, we got a bill for $10,000 for storage of sidewalk cafe tables. But these owners just went to Costco and replaced the tables and chairs for $100 and it started all over again. Now, we say that if you are unlicensed we’re not just going to take your tables, we, in fact, after three strikes, we’re going to shut the restaurant. We rewrote this law, the council in its wisdom passed it. We streamlined the system, we increased the fees based on square footage and location, and, because we beefed up enforcement, communities didn’t have to suffer from unlicensed sidewalk cafes. Last summer, we only had to shut one sidewalk cafe. Now, on our side, we hold ourselves to getting this license processed in 120 days.

Q: What sorts of things do you plan to focus on in the coming year?

We’re trying to shorten the licensing applications and standardizing them to make them more business-friendly. We are in the process of reviewing the entire DCA code, known as Title 20, to see whether there are examples of anachronistic laws. The law actually says, for example, that laundromats are not allowed to be open on Sunday, so theoretically we should be enforcing that, but we’re not enforcing that because New Yorkers need them open on Sunday. We won’t roll that out piece by piece, but maybe by the end of the year we’ll have a package omnibus bill that cleans up Title 20.

We’re about to launch a campaign to get people to open bank accounts and work with banks to provide no-cost or low-cost checking accounts.

We’re going to focus on employment agencies, and immigration services, and probably debt collectors. We’re picking areas where the greatest harm is done to the greatest number.