Whitewater has a Transient Merchant Ordinance, at Chapter 5.28, et seq., of her Municipal Code, but the ordinance’s title is only half right. It’s not merely an ordinance that restricts food trucks’ sales, but also and necessarily consumers’ purchases. It’s part Transient Merchant Ordinance and part Consumer Restriction Ordinance.
Each and every time a city limits what, where, and when someone may sell, it also limits what, where, and when consumers may buy.
Fewer sellers means fewer consumer choices, of tasty and competitively-priced food. The emphasis on regulating merchants obscures the true nature of an ordinance like ours.
After all, why are there restrictions on hours of sale now? It’s because regulators know that if there were no hourly restrictions, consumer demand would spur vendors to establish food trucks to satisfy residents’ preferences.
When the times or places of food sales are restricted, a city is telling adults that no matter what their tastes and preferences, they may not purchase a certain kind of food at a certain time. It’s also, as one can guess, the case of a municipality rigging the game to favor incumbent brick-and-mortar merchants over food trucks.
It’s not the place of city government to put its finger on the scale, so to speak, between kinds of private offerings.
(There’s an irony in this: The State of Wisconsin allows beer sales from 6 AM, but the City of Whitewater will not allow sales of breakfast sandwiches from food trucks in her business district until 9 AM.)
It makes sense to look at other cities’ ordinances, and we’d do well to follow the simplest method of collecting any fees, for example, if we are to adopt that kind of burden for merchants who might sell within our parks. One should be practical: revenue collection of this kind is hardly the mainstay of municipal income, and we’d be foolish to make collection complicated for either vendors or the city.
About practicality, nothing I’ve said prevents local government from conducting fair and reasonable health inspections, etc., on food trucks, just as can be done now with restaurants.
But doubt not what all these time and location restrictions really are: a decision of a municipal government to limit what adult men and women can buy and eat, regardless of their preferences or ability to pay.