Burbank Plans to Enforce Ban on Vendors by Seizing Pushcarts : Council: Officials say the target of the technique would be the suppliers who provide the sellers with their wares.

Citing a need for better enforcement, the Burbank City Council has ordered a plan drafted that would allow authorities to seize the pushcarts of street vendors who violate a ban passed earlier this year.

The council also decided to target large distributors who supply street vendors with the tools of their trade: pushcarts, ice cream and other products.

“The focus of this is not the poor guy trying to make a living,” said Burbank Police Chief David P. Newsham. “The focus is to get to the person that’s causing the law to be violated.”

Under the proposal, authorities could seize the pushcarts and store them and their contents at the police station or city storage yard as evidence, Newsham said. Police could track down the supplier, who would also face prosecution for violating the ordinance.

“Then that person would be dealt with appropriately,” Newsham said.

The council is expected to vote on the ordinance in early December.

Seizure is not a unique enforcement mechanism, said City Atty. Joe Fletcher. In September, the L. A. County Health Department and police confiscated cooking equipment and other paraphernalia from illegal street vendors in Panorama City and Van Nuys.

The raid prompted an outcry from vendors, some of whom were participants in a class sponsored by Mission College that helps vendors learn to make their business legal through sanitation and health permit education.

But in Burbank, the motion passed with virtually no debate among council members or comments from city residents.

Councilman Dave Golonski was the lone dissenter in the 3-1 vote.

“I didn’t favor the original ordinance that out-and-out banned pushcart vendors,” Golonski said. “I would be more in favor of having a licensing scheme for them, then I would favor seizure of the pushcarts of unlicensed vendors.”

Some who have been involved in the long-running and often heated debate about street vendors in Los Angeles questioned the city’s assumption that seizure would serve as a means of holding large distributors accountable.

“While some of the vendors are exploited by others and do use carts that are supplied by others, our experience is the majority are self-owned,” said Madeline Janis-Aparicio, attorney for the Street Vendors Assn. “The big owners are not going to be hampered by a cart seizure here or there.”

Janis-Aparicio and others who represent street vendors said, nationwide, those cities that have been most successful in addressing the street-vendor question are those that “give people incentives to comply with health and business regulations, that treat street vending as a business regulation problem rather than a criminal problem.”

“There’s a question of gravity here, of harshness,” said Janis Aparicio, who sat on a city of Los Angeles street-vending task force three years ago. “Certainly there’s a big political question of fairness. Is it because these vendors are Latino that they think they can do this?”

The Burbank street-vending ordinance, which went into effect in March, prohibits street vending from any one place for more than 15 minutes, vending from non-motorized vehicles and displaying goods outside a vehicle.

But despite the new law, and warnings by license inspectors, some vendors have continued to sell, Newsham said.

“The ordinance that was passed gave us insufficient tools to adequately enforce the resolution,” Newsham said.

Inspectors attempting to enforce the ordinance are faced with a number of problems. Most of the vendors in Burbank “do not speak English” and may not know their activities are illegal, Newsham said. Those who are cited are often undocumented immigrants who do not have identification, he said.

“Accordingly, there is a high probability that these violators will not appear for their court hearings,” Newsham said.

In some instances, those who are cited continue to sell after the officer and inspector leave.

Typically, vending in Burbank increases during spring, summer and on the weekend. This summer there were “quite a few violators,” said Terre Hirsch, supervisor of the License and Code services department, which is responsible for enforcing the ordinance.

“We felt people would comply without us getting that tough. We found that during the peak season they weren’t.

“Now, we’ll have the teeth in the ordinance to really make it effective.”