L. A. Looking for Palatable Solution to Street Vending : Ordinance: The council will consider a plan to legalize and regulate the city’s 5,000 sidewalk merchants.

The warm smell of grilled corn wafts from a sidewalk barbecue. Bells jangle on the cart of a paletero , an ice cream vendor. And a middle-aged man sits on a tarp in a vacant lot, fervently singing the praises of the wrenches, pliers and screwdrivers spread before him.

To the 5,000 street vendors of Los Angeles, mostly immigrants from Latin America, these are the sounds and images of their native lands and of fledgling entrepreneurship in their new home.

But for many of the city’s more entrenched inhabitants, they are the symbols of blight, unfair business competition and a public health hazard. “It’s like a Third World country,” one angry homeowner said. “This is not what the United States is about.”

Selling from sidewalks and streets is strictly illegal in the city of Los Angeles. But the immigration boom and simultaneous contraction of the job market have resulted in a dramatic increase in street merchants--selling fruit at freeway on-ramps, hawking used clothes on vacant lots and pushing tamale carts around the city.

Simply banning the vendors hasn’t worked--police are usually too busy with violent crime to make arrests for what is a simple misdemeanor violation of the Municipal Code.

So now, many Los Angeles officials have decided, if you can’t stop them, regulate them. Friday, the City Council is scheduled to hold a public hearing on a proposed two-year pilot project to legalize street vending, while imposing a host of restrictions and limiting the activity to a few commercial districts.

Lawmakers in Los Angeles, and in many other Southern California cities, have found that tackling the issue of street vending means reconciling a confusion of competing values. Vendors want a legal way to break into the mainstream economy, but established merchants say they are unfair competitors. Urban planners want to promote street life and a cosmopolitan atmosphere, but homeowners complain about noise, garbage and shabby pushcarts. Customers relish a freshly grilled taco or an intricately carved mango, but health inspectors fear contamination and the spread of disease.

Underlying much of the debate is the strong emotional undertow of ethnic relations and the national controversy over immigration.

The latest outcry against vending came Wednesday from a group of Korean Americans and black shop owners who stood on the steps of City Hall, waving American flags and claiming that the mobile merchants are unfairly cutting into their livelihoods.

Many cities have already acted to check sidewalk salesmanship.

The Burbank City Council is expected to vote this month on an ordinance that officials say targets large distributors who supply street vendors with pushcarts and products.

It would authorize police to seize the carts and products of those caught violating the ban, and authorize prosecution of the cart owners as well as the vendors.

The proposal is designed to “give teeth” to Burbank’s ban on street vending, which went into effect in March but which some vendors have ignored.

Critics argue that many street vendors own their own carts and that the amendment will hurt the vendor on the street more than it will the supplier.

In Anaheim, the City Council last month passed a law reducing vending hours and forcing pushcart merchants to change locations every 10 minutes. In heavily Latino Santa Ana, the number of vendors permitted to operate in the city was capped at 200.

Other cities, though, are heading in the opposite direction. In Bell Gardens, another heavily Latino city, officials recently reversed a longstanding ban on vending.

And Santa Monica legalized vending in special districts five years ago. It is now so popular on the thriving 3rd Street Promenade, an outdoor mall, that merchants pay $600 a month and 5% of their receipts to park their pushcarts there.

Progress has been slower in Los Angeles, and the proposed ordinance much more complex.

Repeated run-ins between the Police Department and vendors, and allegations that the police have used excessive force have fueled calls by vendors and their advocates to legalize their trade.

About 40 vendors who lived on notorious Blythe Street in Panorama City, many of them from Puebla, Mexico, have been meeting since August in classes that train them to properly prepare food to meet county health department standards. The classes are funded by a $250,000 grant from the city of Los Angeles, and held by Mission College’s business and professional center.

At the same time, the building where the vendors live and once conducted classes has been the target of three health department visits since July.

The visits, which have resulted in confiscated corn, prepackaged ice cream and cooking equipment, have led to one arrest and several health department citations, causing dozens of the vendors to flee to other, unknown sites to conduct their trade.

Recently, however, the vendors have organized into a group called Blythe Street Renaissance to voice their concerns to police and county health officials.

Los Angeles vendors came together six years ago to fight alleged abuses, formalizing their organization in 1989 as the Street Vendors Assn. They gained an important champion in City Councilman Mike Woo. But it took the next three years for a task force to report on the issue and for the City Council to give conceptual approval to legalized street vending.

The final push toward legalization began in July with the arrival on the City Council of two vendor supporters, Richard Alarcon and Jackie Goldberg. The council members gained a powerful and unexpected ally in the Central City Assn., a downtown business alliance that has suggested modifications to make the vending ordinance palatable to business.

Under the proposal that is likely to come to a vote Wednesday, vending in most of the city will remain a misdemeanor, punishable by up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine. Street sales would be limited to a maximum of eight special districts and would remain illegal in all residential areas.

The special districts would be formed under an exhaustive application process, in which vendors would have to receive approval from 20% of the business people and residents on blocks where they want to operate. Individual merchants would have absolute veto power over placement of carts in front of their stores.

The ordinance also requires City Council members to appoint advisory committees in each of the proposed vending districts, with vendors, shop owners, police and others to draw up a comprehensive plan for regulating street sales. The plans would then be forwarded to the city’s Board of Public Works, which would have the final say on creating districts.

No districts have been designated yet, although the Street Vendors Assn. and others have suggested possibilities: at Santa Monica Boulevard and Western Avenue in Hollywood, along parts of Van Nuys and Sepulveda boulevards in Van Nuys, around MacArthur Park, west of downtown, on Pico Boulevard near the Westside Pavilion shopping center and on Vermont Avenue in South-Central Los Angeles.

The two-year life of the districts would be extended, and districts added in other neighborhoods, only if the City Council deemed the arrangement successful.

For shop owners like Peter Martinez, spokesman for many business people on Olvera Street, the need for regulation of vending is clear. Martinez said businesses along the historic shopping mall suffered two years ago with the proliferation of vendors around nearby La Placita Catholic Church.

“It was just out of hand,” Martinez said, noting that the vendors do not have to pay rent, taxes and other expenses that permanent merchants do. “People have built their lives in these businesses and for someone just to come in like that, I don’t think it’s fair.”

When the vendors were moved away by police, business jumped nearly 50% for Olvera Street’s taquito stands, Martinez said.

His complaints are echoed by some merchants along Brooklyn Avenue in Boyle Heights, on Broadway in Downtown and elsewhere, although many say they can live with vending that is well regulated.

They are backed by residents with a shopping list of aesthetic complaints--from some who say the bells and cries of the vendors disturb them to others who are appalled by makeshift used-clothing sales that crop up on chain-link fences around the city.

“But when you look out your window and you see someone from who-knows-where coming to sell their wares, I think it is awful,” said Kathy Cheeseman of Windsor Village in central Los Angeles. “It is unbelievable the city has allowed this to happen.”

But vendors and their allies say they are confused and troubled by such sentiments.

Abel Cardenas, at 54, is the elder statesman among the 10 vendors who squat each day on an empty lot in Avalon.

Times are tough. A few days before, Cardenas explains, he saw two days of earnings wiped out when building and safety inspectors issued him an $81 citation for operating on private property.

But he said the street merchants are very aware that they must do more to fit into their environment.

They have already taken up a collection to clean up their trash at the end of the day. They point customers and fellow vendors to toilet facilities in the park, rather than bushes in the corner of the empty lot. Cardenas said he would even share his profits with nearby store owners if they think that his sales of new and used tools are cutting into their business.

At least he is not on welfare, he says.

“We are just trying to make a living,” he said. “I don’t understand why we are being persecuted.”

Through the city’s sidewalk vending administrator, Robert Valdez, many of the vendors know that they may soon have a chance to go legal. They have many worries, including how they will raise the $1,300 to $2,600 for permits and a legal pushcart.

But most are like Refugio Rolon, who recently tended a steaming kettle of corn on Echo Park Boulevard. Rolon, 56, said she was a vendor near Mexico City and has been one here since she arrived 10 years ago.

“At my age, I can’t find something else to do,” Rolon said. “I will pay all the costs and do whatever I have to. As long as they let me work. I want to work.”

The final obstacle to approval of the ordinance is the desire of many council members to draw a comprehensive plan for policing street vending before the practice is legalized. They argue that inspections will be needed in the districts to make sure that vendors abide by the rules. And they say illegal vending outside the districts must be stopped.

Councilwoman Rita Walters said she will insist that a comprehensive enforcement plan is in place before the law passes. “It has gotten so prevalent that it just cries out for some control,” Walters said. “Otherwise, it just becomes part of the general decline and decay.”

Times staff writer Jocelyn Y. Stewart and correspondent Jeff Schnaufer contributed to this story.