SANTA PAULA : Food Inspection Fee Might End Festival

After 22 years of food, games and music, the Santa Paula Citrus Festival is threatened by a county plan to charge an inspection fee for food booths operated by nonprofit agencies, festival organizers warned Friday.

“A fee would absolutely kill us,” said Dave Gillette, president of the Santa Paula Kiwanis Club, which sponsors the three-day event in August. He said he doubts most clubs could pay the estimated $42 fee.

“And if there’s no food for sale, the whole festival will probably die.”

Until now, nonprofit groups that sold food at street fairs, festivals and other community events were considered exempt from most public heath codes and were not required to get a county inspection.

The Santa Paula festival is one of many civic events affected by a ruling by Atty. Gen. John Van de Kamp that such groups are not exempt from health and safety code requirements. The county Environmental Health Department announced earlier this week that it will begin inspecting such booths and charging a fee for the service.

“Now that an opinion has been rendered, we can’t just ignore it. We have to do the inspections,” said Bob Williamson, department spokesman.

“The Board of Supervisors can either decide to OK the user’s fee we recommend, modify it, or they can take the money to run the inspections out of the general fund. But someone has to pay.”

The fee for profit-making organizations is $42 per booth. A fee proposal for nonprofit agencies will be submitted to the board in May, and new requirements probably will be imposed by July, Williamson said.

City officials from Ventura and Santa Paula oppose the fee.

The Kiwanis Club, which receives most of its revenue by renting food booths at the Citrus Festival for $160 each, gives money to local schools, a youth soccer program and the library, Gillette said.

Under the new rules, food booths also must be altered to meet stricter safety codes. Gillette estimated that the alterations would cost about $50 to $75.