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Date: 10/4/2022
HOLYOKE – During the Ordinance Committee and Planning Board’s Sept. 27 joint meeting, a public hearing was opened on creating an ordinance establishing food truck zones.
City Councilors Linda Vacon and Jose Maldonado Velez filed the order that led to the hearing to discuss creation of an ordinance to establish food truck zones in the city with the goals of eliminating food deserts, managing the locations and promoting various neighborhoods.
Vacon began conversations by explaining she had filed an order that once a street vendor had a special permit, they wouldn’t need to come back in for a hearing. In context of that discussion came up with the idea of food trucks sometimes budding into other activities, festivals and businesses. On the flip side, the idea also came up of potential areas in the city that could benefit from a “concentrated presence of food trucks,” according to Vacon.
“We came to understand that it really would trip into zoning and so that we really needed to bring it up in the context of a public hearing,” Vacon said.
The Ordinance Committee was seeking input from the city’s legal department on how this could be done under zoning. At-Large Councilor Kevin Jourdain said they were all in favor of looking into their options and said there were a number of public interests being looked into with the potential changes.
“One is we want to protect our restaurants that spend all this money to have a restaurant and encourage development of having restaurants particularly in the downtown without worrying about if somebody pulls up a food truck in front of your restaurant,” Jourdain said. “Number two is we also want to be strategic in that, what can we do to encourage food trucks to come to the city so that we’re putting sources of high-quality good food in neighborhoods that are underserved…”
Jourdain said a third public interest being accounted for was from an economic development perspective, citing New Haven, CT and their coastline that is often filled with food truck vendors from all over the area on weekends.
The committee and Jourdain were seeking some guidance and clarity on how to best approach this decision from the Planning Board.
“What is our best mechanism to do because people are coming to us applying for permits to do these food trucks,” Jourdain said. “Let’s kind of think this all through together and how can we come up with making this serve a number of these important purposes, and other purposes.”
Planning Board member Kate Kruckemeyer spoke first in response and said she was supportive of both the idea of having more food trucks and also better regulating it. She did raise a concern on if zoning was the right options for regulation of food trucks.
“I worry that zoning is not the right place for this because it’s easy to talk about food truck zones, but I think that’s a different use of the word zone,” Kruckemeyer said. “In my mind, what’s beautiful about food trucks – yes we might be talking about creating specific locations where food trucks could go – but part of the beauty of food trucks is their adaptability and the way they can change with conditions.”
Kruckemeyer added that zoning is “clunky and slow and permanent” but was happy the Planning Board were invited to a discussion with ordinance on the matter. Vacon and Councilor Kocayne Givner raised the question on the verbiage of the order and asked if Assistant City Solicitor Kathleen Degnan could provide some clarity.
Givner noted she thought the intention was to create and designate areas for food truck vendors and protect restaurants. She added one reason for this was to have a better way of keeping track of permitted food trucks.
Degnan responded to the question and mentioned how zoning is not just indicating where things can go and that it’s also about where things can’t go.
“There’s a lot of concern and it’s understandable, that we want to protect the stone and mortar and brick restaurants that have invested more in the city,” Degnan said.
Kruckemeyer responded and said if the city decides to set up zoning for food trucks and decided on three “great” areas for food trucks, it could be interpreted as food trucks are not allowed anywhere else in the city. She noted that this was still preliminary talks on this topic and had not had much time to think it through but setting up a potential overlay district with rules may be a better option than general zoning.
Planning Board Chair Mimi Panitch said she would worry about creating micro districts going through zoning with this process.
“I understand the need to protect our restaurants, but do we want to establish districts where there are food trucks and we’re discouraging restaurants from necessarily coming in because this is where the food trucks will be?” Panitch said.
Director of Planning and Economic Development Aaron Vega joined the discussion and said an important point of establishing parts of town to regulate food trucks was to address food desserts. He also noted food trucks move through different areas of the city already and even go to businesses during lunch hours, so some sort of flexibility was need as opposed to any strict zoning.
Discussions continued before closing with questions for legal, the board and the committee to look into before coming back to this discussion at a later date.
“I think we’re sort of walking through a cave with a candle at this point. And we’re kind of figuring it out,” Jourdain said.