The city’s Latino activists have it right in the ongoing controversy regarding proposed restrictions for taco-cart vendors which dot the downtown district. At the very least, city officials should engage the embattled vendors in a constructive dialogue that doesn’t lead to the disappearance of these businesses.

On face value, the proposed restrictions seem reasonable. Operators must secure access to a nearby restroom for the hours that the cart is serving food and must furnish the information to the city and state’s health departments. Vendors are subject to a criminal-background check with their business-license applications or renewals. The city will notify surrounding property owners that it intends to issue a license for a vending cart and those property owners will have three weeks to comment. Vendors who cook with grease must clean the sidewalk in front of their carts twice a month. Carts south of 600 South can be required by the city’s transportation engineer to arrange for parking. Stands are no longer allowed west of West Temple.

The controversy has been running for years. Mark Alvarez, an attorney and former staff member in Rocky Anderson’s administration, had worked with vendors on these matters before he joined city government. The city council’s initial ordinance, passed with all affirmative votes and one abstention, would have strictly limited the vendors. That ordinance was passed without any input from the vendors. With the force of Latino community activists, the ordinance was revised to allow vendors to set up within a defined municipal district. That ordinance passed with the same vote outcome. Incidentally, this ordinance specified the sanitary conditions needed to meet health department requirements. Also, the city police have worked well with taco cart vendors on matters of public safety.

Among the most vocal proponents for the limitations was Nancy Saxton, who will be leaving City Council after her defeat by Luke Garrott who will take his seat in January, representing the downtown district. This would be an excellent opportunity for Garrott to work with other members of council and with Ralph Becker, the new mayor, to use this issue as a good case example of the sort of dialogue that is needed in an increasingly diverse city. I cannot escape the fact that Saxton’s aggressive stance on this issue may, in part, have been fueled by the campaign support provided by one of the key business principals of Taco Time, a franchised enterprise which has a store located in the heart of the vendor district at question.

Sidewalk food vendors are ubiquitous in many cosmopolitan cities. In many cases, their offerings have been touted and celebrated by food critics and chefs. Food luminaries such as Anthony Bourdain and Andrew Zimmern frequently have featured vendors who combine industrious enterprise with an honest approach to freshly prepared food to produce satisfying results. The taco stands are important to the livelihood of their owners and families.

The dialogue should be realistic. Nearly all customers who go to the stands will spend perhaps just a few minutes at most, even much less than what one might spend at a fast-food restaurant. And, for the record, there have been plenty of instances where patrons – scores of them, in fact – have been sickened at well-established restaurants, even here in Salt Lake City.

Community activists are rightfully concerned. These restrictions do more to foment the perception that the ordinance is a significant step toward eliminating taco stands from the downtown landscape – not a particularly good public relations move for a city that insists on celebrating its cosmopolitanism.

And, the critical omission of the vendors from the process of discussing ways in which mutual concerns are reconciled is troubling. The city hardly needs another pretext that incurs further hostility toward immigrants who are doing their best to become productive community members.

The city should do everything to show its consistency here. After all, as Mark says, “the City Council should be careful about changing a structure that seems to have served the city well for several years.”

In the spirit of fairness, the new city administration and the new city council would do well to continue this dialogue conscientiously aware that there might be feasible alternatives that suggest the problem truly is not as intractable as the proposed ordinance has framed it.