The Riverside City Council recently voted 6-1 to punt on making a decision about sidewalk vending rules, but fortunately for only two months.
Following passage of Senate 946 which decriminalizes sidewalk vending and generally requires localities to allow sidewalk vendors, Riverside has been prompted to rewrite their existing policies to do so.
“I think it’s about time that we bring them into our formal economy,” Mayor Pro Tem Gaby Plascencia said at the meeting on Tuesday, July 20.
Plascencia is right.
According to reporting by David Downey, proposed revisions include an extension “from the current 10 minutes to 30 minutes the time a roaming sidewalk vendor could stay in one place in a residential area and eliminate the cart size limit of six feet in length and four feet in width.”
That sounds reasonable to us.
Councilman Ronaldo Fierro, who owns a downtown business, proposed postponing the vote.
“There is a lot of fear. There is a lot of concern,” he said of the feedback he has received about moving ahead with easing restrictions on sidewalk vendors.
But let’s be real. We’re talking about sidewalk vending here. The sky is not going to fall because sidewalk vendors are given some reasonable guidelines to follow so they can support themselves and their families.
Understandably, some brick-and-mortar business owners are reluctant to go out of their way to support sidewalk vendors and are somewhat incentivized to oppose them and particularly to reach out to a councilmember about it.
But the role of a local government isn’t to decide economic winners-and-losers.
Just as the rise of food trucks hasn’t brought the collapse of brick-and-mortar businesses anywhere, loosened rules for sidewalk vendors won’t, either.“I myself have never left a restaurant because I heard the ice cream man outside, to go buy an ice cream,” noted Gabriela Mendez, an organizer for the Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice, at the meeting.
Precisely.
It’s a shame Riverside punted on what’s really not a complicated issue.
Riverside should move ahead as quickly as possible and punt no more.
