Photo by ep_jhu

A fourth round of public comments on proposed regulations for the District’s food truck industry began today after Mayor Vince Gray’s office said it would like to have more input on how mobile food vendors should be governed.

The Washington Post’s Tim Carman reports that Gray’s office says it simply wants more comments and that the new round is not related to a batch of emails that the food trucks’ industry group attempted to send but were never received. The D.C. Food Truck Association set up a website, RulesThatWork.org, to aid food truck employees and fans in sending automated letters to the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs.

But more than 1,100 emails never turned up, and DCRA suggests the transmission failure might have originated with the Food Truck Association.

“As far as the IT folks here tell me, the issue was not on our end,” DCRA spokesman Helder Gil writes in an email.

Gil adds that the agency typically does not struggle to receive emails sent by websites capable of pumping out a large volume of public comments: “And when we issued proposed vending regs earlier this year, we received a huge number of automated emails with absolutely no problems.”

RulesThatWork.org is back online today, imploring visitors to send concerns over the proposed food truck regulations to city officials. The regulations were first proposed in January, after complaints from the District’s brick-and-mortar eateries that food trucks were taking in lots of dining business while skirting the same rules that apply to restaurants.

Much of the proposed rule-making concerns where food trucks can park, and many proprietors have said that some of the guidelines over sidewalk width would keep them away from popular downtown lunch spots like Farragut and Franklin squares. Some new requirements on food trucks have gone into effect, though. In October, trucks began collecting the same 10 percent sales tax that applies to restaurants.