County Cracks Down on Vendors : Panorama City: Health officials confiscate truckloads of cooking equipment. Street sellers say their livelihoods have been taken away.

County health officials staged a daylong crackdown on illegal street vendors in the San Fernando Valley Saturday, confiscating three truckloads of cooking equipment and prompting an outcry from vendors who say their livelihoods have been taken from them.

Although there were no arrests in the L.A. County Health Department operation, it resulted in the confiscation of seven propane stoves and other paraphernalia from illegal street vendors in Panorama City and Van Nuys, said Lt. Tom Mears of the Van Nuys police station.

The operation targeted unlicensed food vendors who work on Sherman Way, Vanowen Street and Van Nuys and Sepulveda boulevards, Mears said. But the operation may have hit hardest in a run-down apartment building in the 14700 block of Blythe Street, which has become a focal point of the illegal street vendor issue.

In July, the building was hit with more than 80 building, health and safety violations, including the illegal cooking of corn with propane tanks. The corn was being cooked inside the apartments, which prompted officials’ concerns about fire hazards.

One of the vendors whose equipment was confiscated was Juvenal Perez, 52.

“Right now there is no work,” Perez said. “What am I going to do unless I can sell corn?” Perez said his corn and condiments were also taken away.

Perez has been making a living roasting corn since he was laid off as a factory worker a year ago. “What are we going to do to eat?” he asked.

Accompanied by police and fire officials, county health officials targeted four apartments in Perez’s building, said Mears. County health officials could not be reached for comment about the operation.

Sgt. John Herkowitz of the LAPD’s Van Nuys division said officers cited several people for misdemeanor violations. Herkowitz didn’t know what the citations alleged, but one citation displayed by a vendor showed it was for “gross unsanitary conditions.”

Exactly what was confiscated at the Blythe Street apartment complex was a matter of dispute. According to Mears, health officials “confiscated and removed various devices for cooking corn to be sold on the streets, including seven separate propane stoves.”

But Valarie Falero, manager of the Blythe Street apartment complex, said she witnessed the morning visit by health officials. She said that more than corn vending supplies were taken. Practically everything that the vendors sell on the street was removed, she said.

“They took all their corn, their chicharrones, their stuff to make snow cones, their stuff to make ice cream,” Falero said.

Perez said some vendors were not told where their equipment and food were being taken or how they could get them returned.

“They didn’t say anything,” he said in Spanish. “They just came and took everything.”

The raid comes at a time when Perez and nearly two dozen other tenants have been trying to legalize their street vending businesses through a series of classes held at the building by Los Angeles Mission College’s business and professional center.

The classes, which teach vendors about sanitation and other health matters, are sponsored by a $250,000 grant from Industry and Commercial Development Department of Los Angeles.