When local food vendors bring a little bit of character to an otherwise bland city park, you’d think the community would rejoice, right? Wrong.

Brick-and-mortar restaurants in Adams Morgan have long complained about Unity Market, an improvised collection of Latino food vendors that have gathered on weekends over the last three years in the concrete triangle at Columbia Road and Champlain Street. Now, as a means to ease the tensions, vendors have agreed to forgo operations on Saturday and instead open only on Thursday, Friday and Sunday as city officials look for a more permanent place to locate them.

As the City Paper’s Lydia DePillis wrote last September, restaurants along Columbia Road complained that the market was stealing business on some of their busiest days. Worse still, they argued, many of the vendors weren’t properly licensed and didn’t pay taxes, allowing them an unfair advantage. The Examiner’s Jonetta Rose Barras focused in on the market in a series of columns earlier this year, pointing out that the D.C. Office of Latino Affairs (OLA) under both Mayor Adrian Fenty and Mayor Vincent Gray had allegedly helped the vendors cut corners and stay in Unity Park.

According to Roxana Olivas, OLA’s current director, her office has worked closely with the vendors to get them licensed and have them report sales taxes. The sheer number of complaints, though, led to the decision to shutter the Saturday market. She hopes that the change will prevent further tensions between legitimate Latino business owners in the area and the Latino vendors — both of which are constituents served by her office. One vendor we spoke to wasn’t happy to be losing Saturday business, though, and said they’d push to get it back.

Olivas said that OLA is still looking for a more permanent place to locate the vendors. A Memorandum of Understanding signed by the Department of Parks and Recreation, which controls the park, OLA and the Department of Real Estate Services that allows the vendors to sell food in the park expires in September, at which point they will have to find somewhere else in the city to do business.

“It’s going to close someday, so we need to find a concrete solution,” Olivas told DCist, adding that many of the vendors make their livelihoods from selling food in the park. She’s exploring private property options that would take them, though nothing is yet set in stone.