Thread: New taco truck law in LA. Some refuse to comply!

Los Angeles - Swarmed around Leo's Taco truck on Eagle Rock Boulevard, about 50 night patrons are stuffing their cheeks with carne asada tacos – and chewing over one of this city's big controversies: taco trucks.

"Why should a taco vendor be able to park in front of someone else's restaurant and steal his customers away with cheaper food?" asks one man, spearing pinto beans on a paper plate with a plastic fork.

"But making them move every hour is a bad idea," says another as he orders a veggie burrito. "How can a truck vendor keep loyal customers if he has to move so often?"

These patrons, like many Angelenos, are as hot as salsa caliente over new rules that go into effect Thursday – what to do with the 14,000 roving restaurateurs who have brought inexpensive entrees, a sense of community, intensifying competition for diners, neighborhood complaints, and a political brouhaha to the street corners of Los Angeles County.

The new county law makes parking a taco truck in one spot for more than an hour punishable by a fine of up to $1,000 or six months in jail, or both. It replaces a longtime but rarely enforced measure that fined trucks $60 if they stayed in one spot longer than 30 minutes. The law affects unincorporated areas of the city – where about 60 percent of the population lives – and includes East Los Angeles, one of the biggest concentrations of Mexican-Americans in the United States.

The five county supervisors passed the new regulations unanimously a month ago, saying the volume of complaints had reached critical mass in recent years.

With less-expensive menu items and lower overhead, the mobile kitchens were forcing established restaurants to close early and suffer losses, according to the East Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce and other business groups.

Bricks-and-mortar restaurants charged that taco trucks were too often parking directly in front of their establishments and siphoning off customers. Growing pressures within the Los Angeles economy – including the soaring prices of gasoline and food and slumping employment – have exacerbated the tension between stationary merchants who have leases to pay, employ many more workers than the mobile vendors – and who dearly need their patrons and parking.

"We have gotten so much negativity from the business community ... [complaining about] how much these trucks take away in business that we felt we had to listen and do something," says Maria Cerdas, a deputy for Supervisor Yvonne Burke. She says more and more trucks have ventured further into residential neighborhoods, where homeowners complain of loud gatherings and music until 2 or 3 a.m.

But the new law is generating a backlash.

Calling themselves the "taco resistance," some 150 of the city's 14,000 licensed vendors have stated they will refuse to comply with the law starting this Thursday. They have hired a lawyer, Philip Greenwald, a veteran of 40 years of representing mobile industrial caterers.

"These trucks pay taxes, they are inspected by the health department, and there is no legitimate reason to be pushing them around," he says. "This is not a matter of unfair competition but restraint of fair trade."

Others worry that one of the city's most distinctive social and cultural features could fall by the wayside.

"Thousands of Angelenos ... have long gathered at the trucks, in many cases since childhood, for quick carnitas burritos or mouthwatering cemitas, ... fired meat and other gut-busting goodness," says a recent editorial in the Los Angeles Times. "Call them what you will: roach coaches, loncheras, snack vans ... but taco trucks are a rich part of our region's heritage."

The Times and a leading political columnist in California, Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee, have called for the county's supervisors to rescind the law as unfair to those at the lower end of the economic ladder.

On Wednesday, a grass-roots campaign (saveourtacotrucks.org), which has gathered thousands of signatures to petition a change in the law, is sponsoring "Taco Libre" – the chance to enjoy a last mobile entree before the new law takes effect.

"The whole taco truck culture in L.A. fills a void left by traditional restaurants," says Aaron Sonderleiter, whose website trumpets the rallying cry, "Carne asada is not a crime." He says the lower price of truck-vendored food (tacos for a buck, giant burritos for $2.50), longer hours of operation, and the outdoor venues create oases of neighborhood camaraderie, social interaction, and safety that are sorely needed in a city dominated by car travel, gang crime, and little pedestrianism and public transportation.

"This is about more than delicious and inexpensive food," adds his Web partner Chris Rutherford. "It's about people and community and neighborhoods."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20080514/ts_csm/ataco

People in Maine have to have a license to have a food stand and it's only in that one place.
Now I see why! I think there is only 4 or 5 in all of Freeport.

Published Thursday May 15, 2008
Controversy sizzles over taco truck restrictions
By JOHN ROGERS Associated Press Writer
The Associated Press
http://omaha.com/index.php?u_page=1000&u_sid=10336007

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Jose Ochoa has parked his taco truck on the same stretch of road since 1989, and, like scores of other lunch vendors around Los Angeles, he refused to pack it up Thursday, the first day for a new law requiring food wagons to move every hour or face $1,000 fines.

Ochoa said he defied the law because he could not afford to desert his customers and because the rule gives an unfair advantage to traditional restaurants while discriminating against the lunch trucks that have served East Los Angeles for decades.

When they approved the regulation last month, Los Angeles County supervisors, who govern the county's unincorporated areas, seemed not to realize that it would launch what has become known locally as the great Taco Truck Wars of 2008.

By the time the law took effect, nearly 9,000 people had signed a petition demanding its repeal. Several taco truckers said they would simply ignore it, and a spokesman for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department indicated deputies wouldn't exactly be racing to enforce it.

In addition to fines, violators could be jailed for up to six months if they don't move their truck within an hour of parking it. Under the old law, they had to move every 30 minutes, but few did because the penalty was only $60.

In heavily Hispanic East Los Angeles, where eating carnitas, quesadillas, cemitas and other Latin-flavored delicacies purchased from a lunch wagon is practically a rite of passage, people were as hot about the issue as a plate of carne asada.

"What? That's terrible! That's terrible!" shouted Roy Mendoza, upon learning that the Tacos El Galuzo truck he and his family have been patronizing for years might have to start hopscotching around town.

"You mean we're going to have to start following this guy around?" Mendoza asked as he and his family waited for their order of tacos, burritos and quesadillas Wednesday night in front of Juan Torres' gleaming white truck just down the street from Ochoa's truck in the heart of East Los Angeles.

As far as Mendoza is concerned, Torres' truck, parked next to a car stereo store and a half-block from a McDonald's, is just another neighborhood restaurant, only with a half-dozen chairs placed on the sidewalk instead of inside a building.

In fact, Mendoza said, the truck is cleaner, serves better food and at about half the price than many of the nearby restaurants he's been in.

"It's not about the restaurants. It's about the food. We go where the food is good," he said.

When the law was adopted on April 15, local business people said it was about the competition restaurants faced from truckers. Restaurateurs had complained for years that with little overhead costs, the truckers were eating their lunch.

"Look around, what do you think? They take away a lot of my business," said Hor Lee, gesturing to her empty restaurant's seating area. She has operated the Chinatown Express in a strip mall just a half-mile down the street from Torres' truck for 11 years. Business was fine until about a year ago, she said, when two other trucks moved just around the corner from her.

"My rent is almost $5,000 a month," she said. "We pay for electricity. We pay for workers. We pay a lot of bills. I think the taco trucks pay maybe only one bill, for a permit. It's not fair."

But Torres, who also wasn't moving his vehicle, said he has far more costs than the average person realizes, starting with the $65,000 he paid for his truck. He also must pay to insure it, pay for a business license and a Health Department permit, and pay a local commissary for overnight parking.

Then there are food and employee costs and the rent he pays to the stereo store so his customers can use its parking lot.

On Wednesday night, he was a man in perpetual motion, fueling the generator that powers his stove, unloading cases of soda and water, and helping his son take orders in Spanish and English. Meanwhile, two employees grilled up huge portions of pork and beef as a steady flow of customers surrounded him.

Sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore said Thursday that deputies "certainly will enforce the law, but whether or not this will be a priority may be another question."

Some critics have complained that the law is racist, although it was introduced by a board member, Gloria Molina, who is Hispanic, like many truck operators.

Molina said at the time she was trying to end a "war" pitting truckers against restaurateurs. A representative for her did not return a call for comment Thursday.

"I don't think it's racial," said truck operator Jose Soliz, whose Mexican immigrant parents also operated a truck. "A lot of different ethnicities operate trucks now.

"I think what happened is that the Board of Supervisors didn't see the big picture," added Soliz, 27, who after earning a business degree from the University of Northern Colorado decided he preferred to be his own boss.

To him and countless others who operate and patronize the taco trucks, the supervisors didn't realize that the food wagons' 90-cent tacos and $3.50 burritos are as American as New York City hot-dog carts.

"They didn't see that taco trucks are part of our culture," he said.

Where's the COC on this? I assume at least most of the restaurants are members of the COC, so how they're not helping with this mess? Cart vendors are definitely hurting the storefront businesses and should be fined heavily.