L.A. County should make it easy for street vendors to do business

Good for the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors for moving forward with plans to allow and to regulate street vendors in the unincorporated parts of the county. The county would join about 16 cities here that have crafted their own rules for vendors.

Weirdly, as Rebecca Ellis explained last month in the L.A. Times, for the last five years, “vendors hawking grilled meats, fresh fruit and used clothes on the streets of unincorporated L.A. County have been stuck in a strange legal gray area: no longer banned, but not yet regulated.”

But a new board resolution, supported by four of the five supervisors so far, would create an ordinance that would set rules for how the vendors can legally operate.

This all comes after a state law was changed six years ago that legalized street vending so long as cities and counties created regulations under which they could operate.

“Now the county must do its part,” Supervisor Hilda Solis said. She believes, and we agree, that having such rules can bring entrepreneurs, so many of whom come from Latino immigrant communities — if you’ve been to a big concert or swap meet in recent years, you are certainly familiar with the famous L.A. street dogs, bacon-wrapped hot dogs sold from carts — responsibly into the local economy.

When a final version of it is passed, vendors will have to register with the county, and to agree not to block sidewalks, or sell on private property, or create litter, and would face fines for non-compliance.

In the first vote on the ordinance, which was 4-0, Supervisor Kathryn Barger abstained. She is worried about the competition with bricks-and-mortar businesses, and notes that established restaurants can be shut down by inspectors and lose a day or more business. She thinks a “care first” aspect to the ordinance in which offending vendors would be educated about the new rules as opposed to being fined for violating them creates an uneven playing field.

It’s an argument as old as objections to parking-space taco trucks from restaurateurs who have to pay rent and much else. And we understand the argument. But street vendors — and taco trucks — are not going away, and we believe bringing them into the health and safety system rather than keeping them as outlaws is a prudent move.