City Ordinances Make Street Vending a Moving Experience

Jaime Marquez now keeps an eye on his watch as he rolls his produce truck down Garnet Lane in Fullerton.

Starting next month, the city will enforce a 15-minute time limit for street vendors to stay in one location, so vendors like Marquez are doing trial runs to get ready for the change.

“They say I’m an eyesore or something like that,” said Marquez, one of half a dozen mobile food vendors in Fullerton. “I say look around. . . . The city should pick its battles.”

In response to complaints about litter and traffic congestion, the City Council voted last week that vendors must keep moving. The ordinance also bans pushcarts that sell fruit, vegetables and flowers.

Fullerton is the latest Orange County municipality to restrict them, following the lead of many other cities, including Anaheim, whose ordinance survived a court challenge last year.

The cities’ laws are essentially the same: Food vendors working from motor vehicles must buy permits, business and health licenses, clean up customer trash near each stop and move at least 200 feet every few minutes.

And people who sell lemonade, corn, ice cream, hot dogs and flowers from pushcarts, bags or other stands are banned from all public sidewalks, streets and alleys.

Some officials say that such laws unfairly target residents trying to make a modest living. Fullerton Mayor Chris Norby, for example, called the new ordinance “draconian” and splintered from his council colleagues with a vote against the measure.

“Frankly, I’m surprised how quickly [the ordinance] passed,” he said. “I thought it was drastic and premature.”

Norby strongly opposed banning pushcarts, saying that to do so limits consumer choice and goes against tradition. Photographs of Fullerton in the 1920s depict street vendors selling popcorn and flowers on downtown sidewalks, Norby said, and he himself “grew up with the Good Humor man.”

“It’s hard for me to want to crack down on people who are merely following in the footsteps of previous immigrants,” the mayor said. “Under this law, a little boy selling shoeshines up and down the street can be cited.”

Other officials question the effectiveness of such ordinances.

John Poole, Anaheim’s code enforcement manager, said his department issued 455 vendor citations in the second half of 1996. The tickets ranged from written warnings to orders to appear in court for not having a current health permit.

Considering that there are fewer than 100 licensed street vendors in the city, Poole said, the number of citations “makes it obvious people just choose not to comply with this particular law.”

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Many Anaheim vendors simply refuse to pay their fines, which range from $37 to $250, until they renew their vehicle registrations, he said. The Department of Motor Vehicles then collects the fines, which are treated as parking tickets.

Poole said Anaheim’s ordinance has been amended three times, with vendors challenging different aspects of it since its inception a decade ago. The current version requires the trucks be insured, move to a new spot every 15 minutes and stay at least 100 feet from intersections.

San Juan Capistrano took a different approach two years ago, when a feud broke out between vendors and city officials in the midst of a campaign by residents to put strict limits on street sales.

“We invited the street vendors themselves to help us develop a policy agreement that both parties would be bound by law to follow,” said Dan McFarland, a building official who drafted the final ordinance. “Together, we came up with an ordinance we could all live with.”

The final version, which has been in effect for more than a year, allows both vendors and pushcart operators to work in nine different neighborhoods until nightfall, as long as they move to a new spot at least once an hour.

The city also limits to 15 the number of people who can hold vending licenses at one time and sets an escalating fine schedule--starting at $100--for citations. Six infractions within a year means suspension of the vendor’s license for 30 days.

The system so far has worked well, McFarland said.

“What we have is an ordinance the vendors agreed to, so they know what is expected of them and they don’t resist the rules,” he said. “There are still some who would like them all gone for good, of course. But we have some order now, some compliance.”