Mobile merchants get 1- year reprieve on licensing
Seven “emerging business permits” due to expire June 15 will be extended for one year to give aldermen time to hammer out terms of a permanent “mobile merchants license” that does not create an unlevel playing field with heavily regulated food trucks.
The City Council’s License Committee granted the extension on Tuesday — with the possibility for additional permits during the year — a week after aldermanic opposition stalled Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s plan to create a new and permanent “mobile merchants license.”
Ald. Tom Tunney ( 44th), owner of Ann Sather’s Restaurants, suggested the City Council use the additional year to examine both food truck and mobile merchants licenses and, perhaps, draft a new ordinance relaxing standards for both.
Food trucks have chafed at a rule that requires them to park at least 200 feet away from brick and mortar restaurants and stay in one place for no longer than two hours.
“Two hours isn’t enough to do the selling of whatever they’re vending. And we’ve heard that from the food trucks, also,” Tunney said Tuesday.
“We’re gonna look at both because there are similarities. We don’t want to go in one direction on retailing and another direction on food. We want to make sure that . . . we’re in concert with the whole idea of mobile vending— whether it’s food or skirts.”
If the full Council approves, the seven “emerging business permits” will now expire on June 15, 2019.
Beth Kregor, director of the Institute for Justice Clinic on Entrepreneurship at the University of Chicago Law School, characterized the two- hour limit that already applies to those temporary permits as a “killer” for mobile merchants.
Some entrepreneurs have been “kind of limping along with that two- hour limit” while others “don’t even bother to get started,” Kregor said.
Kregor said it’s a “real shame” because “pop- ups” including mobile vendors can be a “great force of excitement and novelty” in a shopping district and draw out customers who may not otherwise have come out to shop.