The D.C. Council committee that oversees regulatory affairs is set to move tomorrow on recommending that the full body reject the District’s proposed food truck regulations. Three weeks after a seven-hour hearing that saw dozens of mobile vendors come before the Committee on Business, Regulatory, and Consumer Affairs, this development is likely to send the regulations, now in their fourth draft, back for more revisions.
The committee recommendation, which was first reported by NBC4’s Tom Sherwood, all but guarantees that the regulations will fail when they go before the full Council, which has until June 22 to take action. The measure revealed today will be introduced by Vincent Orange (D-At Large), who chairs the regulatory oversight committee, while the panel’s other four members—David Grosso (I-At Large), Jim Graham (D-Ward 1), Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3), and Yvette Alexander (D-Ward 7)—are expected to back it.
Additionally, NBC4 reports that Orange’s committee will attempt to tweak several of the most burdensome hodgepodge rules that currently govern food trucks, including a requirement that they park along sidewalks that are at least 10 feet wide. The full Council can only reject, confirm, or take no action at all on the regulations when they come before the chamber. Assuming the Council votes to kick the regulations back to the Department of Regulatory and Consumer Affairs, yet another revision will begin.
“We’re so grateful of members of committee showing this leadership and thousands of District residents who stood up for food trucks,” says Che Ruddell-Tabisola, the political director of the Food Truck Association of Metropolitan Washington. “There is overwhelming public support for rejecting these regulations and the D.C. Council is hearing that loud and clear.”
Ruddell-Tabisola, who also owns the BBQ Bus food truck, says that members of his industry are still eager to work with city officials on finding an agreeable regulatory regime. Though based on the tenor of the May 10 slog, the major issues are the 10-foot rule, the lottery for parking spaces in nearly two dozen proposed “mobile vending zones,” and keeping food trucks that do not win lottery spots at least 500 feet from the designated zones, though city officials say there are more parking spaces than food trucks in existence.
“Honestly, man, 70 of those pages are not controversial,” Ruddell-Tabisola says, referring to the regulations content concerning food safety and labor. “We’re not far off from getting these regs right.”
But backers of the proposed regulations are disappointed by Orange’s turn today. “We believe that the proposed regulations strike the proper balance, and urge the Council to support them,” Pedro Ribeiro, a spokesman for Mayor Vince Gray, writes in an email.
Kathy Hollinger, the president of the Restaurant Association Metropolitan Washington, says her group is “not pleased” by the prospect of the regulations that the organization strongly backed going back to the notepad.
“We’re pretty disappointed,” Hollinger says. “This has been a four-year discussion and there have been several iterations of the proposed regs. We really think that with what DCRA said and how the proposed regs read gives mobile vendors a lot of leeway.”
Hollinger says RAMW is hoping the remainder of the Council will reject the Business, Regulatory, and Consumer Affairs Committee’s guidance and pass them as is. “We are hopeful the rest of the Council can see the balance around this,” she says.
Those odds seem grim, though.
