Planning Board passes on food trucks crackdown

 

BY PRU SOWERS

KONK LIFE STAFF WRITER

 

The Planning Board has sidestepped efforts by Key West city officials to put a temporary halt to licensing new food trucks.

City planning department staff had asked that board members endorse a six-month moratorium, called a “zoning in progress,” on issuing new permits for mobile food trucks. The purpose was to give staff time to write proposed codes regulating the proliferation of the food service trucks.

Senior Planner Brendon Cunningham told planning board members the city needs a definition of mobile food dispensing vehicles in order to ensure that the vehicles don’t create drainage and dumping problems and that they conform to handicapped accessibility laws. The city may also want to consider limiting the trucks to certain zoning districts and impose requirements mandating a minimum distance from a neighboring restaurant, Cunningham said, so that the trucks don’t create unfair competition.

“Some are full kitchens. Some are just a hot dog cart. They go from that to that,” he said.

“We want to clearly define it so everyone knows what they are, what they look like, where they can be and under what circumstances, what hours,” City Planner Don Craig said.

Currently no such regulations exist, but city inspectors have been trying to impose electric, water and sewer code guidelines on two new food trucks in Key West. However, city attorneys have been unsuccessful in convincing a special magistrate judge, and now the planning board, that the city has jurisdiction over the trucks.

Planning board members were concerned that the resolution put forth by staff was too vague and did not address the issue of whether a food truck is a restaurant or an operating motor vehicle. If the trucks have been issued license plates and registration tags by the state Department of Motor Vehicles, then the state, not the city, has jurisdiction.

“This is problematic the way it is drafted,” said Planning Board Chair Richard Klitenick. “This just leads to a bunch of arguments. What is the public on notice that you are regulating?”

After discussion, planning board member Sam Holland moved to approve the zoning in progress resolution but no one seconded the motion, killing it on the floor.

It was the latest in a string of defeats the city has had in its attempts to put food trucks under city governance. Special Magistrate Jeff Overby last month threw out multiple alleged code infractions against White Street Station, a food truck at 1127 Truman Ave. owned by Michael Wilson. Overby criticized the city’s argument that the food truck is an affixed structure that puts it under city code regulations. White Street Station, unlike mobile food trucks at Higgs Beach, remains at the corner of Truman and White streets and is not driven to its location every day.

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