A coalition of immigrant business owners has threatened New York City with a lawsuit over planned government-owned grocery stores they say will unfairly undermine their businesses. On Monday, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said he would move forward with building a series of government owned grocery stores and promised a 30% discount on certain staple items such as fresh produce, meat and seafood. According to a report by the New York Post, the board of the Multicultural Business Coalition—which “formed earlier this year to create a unified front against Mamdani’s grocery policy”—decided to file a lawsuit to stop the project. The chairman of the group has complained that the Mamdani administration won’t meet with them and hear their concerns about the planned stores. “The mayor doesn’t seem to want to sit down with us,” the organization’s chairman Frank Garcia said in an interview with the Post. Fox News reported that the coalition “is now planning to send a letter to Mamdani’s office in the coming days detailing its upcoming legal plans to protect competing stores, bodegas and other small businesses.” The New York City Chamber of Commerce noted that MBC was created to represent “Hispanic, Asian, Caribbean, African, Middle Eastern, Jewish, South Asian, and immigrant constituencies, with particularly strong representation from the New York–New Jersey region.” The chairman stressed that his organization is not launching partisan attacks on Mamdani and the New York City government, but rather is trying to raise awareness of how policies are affecting businesses. “We’re nonpartisan. So we’re going to meet everybody, Republican or Democrat,” Garcia told Fox News. “There was a Democratic Jewish organization. There were others that we’re gonna meet with [along with] civil rights organizations. We’re gonna be with all the different civil rights organizations that are willing to support this and have the funding already to fund this.” The coalition plans to move ahead with the lawsuit if the mayor “does not respond or meet with the organization within the next three weeks,” Fox News reported. The mayor’s office has not commented publicly on the potential lawsuit. The Daily Signal reached out to the mayor’s office about whether officials plan to meet with the coalition but did not receive a reply by publication time. “We are not looking to compete with bodegas or grocery stores when it comes to their ability to survive,” Mamdani said at his Monday press conference announcing the municipal grocery stores. Mamdani ally Gustavo Gordillo, a chairman of New York City’s chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, dismissed the idea that the stores offering below-market prices on goods would hurt local businesses. “If one publicly owned grocery store that brings prices down in the neighborhood is enough to put someone out of business, then maybe they shouldn’t have been in that business in the first place,” Gordillo said in a recent interview on Fox News.