Biz group seeks food truck ban on part of Downer Ave.
Food trucks would be banned on a portion of North Downer Avenue on Milwaukee’s east side, under a measure that won support Thursday from a committee of the Milwaukee Common Council.
The trucks would be banned on the east and west sides of North Downer Avenue from East Webster Place to East Park Place.
The two-block stretch includes Boswell Book Company, Pizza Man, Café Hollander and Stone Creek Coffee.
In a letter to Ald. Nik Kovac, whose district includes the area, the executive director of the Downer Avenue Business
Improvement District wrote in support of the ban.
“We support this ban because food trucks parking on this main commercial stretch of Downer Avenue block storefronts, take much-desired customer parking (sometimes without paying the meters), tend to have loud generators that take away from the relative quiet of the street, and tend to negatively impact the brick & mortar businesses on the street that pay into the BID, while the food trucks themselves do not pay similar assessments to be present on a regular basis,” Executive Director Elizabeth Brodek wrote.
At Thursday’s meeting of the Common Council’s Public Safety and Health Committee, Kovac said the Downer Avenue BID had brought the issue to his attention last week, and a recent attempt to ask a food truck operator to relocate to a different spot had been unsuccessful.
Kovac said that the trucks take up customer parking spaces, adding that parking is currently at “even more of a premium” due to the Active Streets initiative that closes some streets to motorized traffic and brick-and-mortar restaurants being allowed to expand their seating into parking spaces.
“I think we’re all very supportive of food trucks — they provide an important service,” Kovac said. “But commercial corridors where you have metered parking in front of brick-and-mortar stores, whether those brick-and-mortar stores are selling food or not, many of them are having large food trucks with generators parked in the metered parking.”
Ron Stroli, who owns the food truck and restaurant with his wife, Chrissy, said their truck has been stopping on that block of Downer for five or six years. He said they haven’t really had an issue until this year, when they’ve gotten complaints about the truck taking a parking spot from local businesses.
The business pays the parking meter for the truck, is allowed to be there and is wanted by the community, he said.
“There’s a great demand for our food truck there, and that’s why we keep coming back every week,” Stroli said.
The measure passed committee without opposition.
The full Common Council next meets on July 28.