Vendors Cheer as Legalization Wins Final OK

More than 300 street vendors cheered a Los Angeles City Council vote Tuesday to legalize their trade and immediately began laying plans to win the approval and acceptance of shop owners and residents.

The council’s 10-4 vote gave final approval to a trial program to permit vending in eight special districts. But the vending zones will not be established until the pushcart entrepreneurs have completed a rigorous permit procedure that requires approval from neighbors and business people.

“This has national significance,” said lawyer Madeline Janis-Aparicio, who helped organize the campaign to legalize street vending. “This is a very disempowered group of people who are completely outside the mainstream and who are subject to a lot of scapegoating. But they persevered for five years to change the law.”

City officials predict that it will take at least six months for the first vending districts to win approval from the Board of Public Works and the City Council.

A gantlet of obstacles could still stand in the way.

First, a group of African American and Korean American merchants has said it may launch a ballot measure to overturn the ordinance. The business people say that street vendors represent unfair competition because they do not have to pay the rents, fees and other overhead costs that fixed businesses do.

“It’s not fair to the existing businesses,” said Greg Smith, a spokesman for the merchants. “To make it legitimate is like a slap in the face.”

Smith said members of the Korean-American Grocers Assn. of California and an African American shop owners group are considering whether to spend the $15,000 or more it could cost to gather the signatures needed to place the question before voters.

Secondly, the City Council has required that a comprehensive enforcement plan be in place before it approves a single vendor. City officials have indicated that they want a combined effort of parking enforcement officers, building and safety inspectors, police officers and street-use inspectors to patrol the legal vending districts and to shut down illegal vendors. But council members thus far have struggled to agree on how much the city should spend, and how far steps should go, to eliminate several thousand illegal vendors.

Finally, it will be up to the vendors themselves to win approval from their neighbors. They will have to initiate their applications by collecting signatures from 20% of the business people and residents in the commercial zones where they want to work. Then they will have to draw a plan--including the locations of carts and the items to be sold--that wins the approval of a neighborhood committee of business people, city officials and police. Permanent business owners will have the power to veto the presence of pushcarts in front of their stores.

Once the vendors and neighborhood committees have drafted a formal proposal, it must be submitted to the Board of Public Works and City Council for final approval.

“It’s a lengthy process. It is very involved,” said Robert Valdez, the city’s new sidewalk vending administrator. “It has protections for the merchants and the residents.”

Selling goods on streets or sidewalks will remain a misdemeanor in most of the city. Violators will be subject to up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine.

The largest street vending group, the 500-member Street Vendors Assn., has said it intends to submit petitions for districts in Pico-Union and Westlake west of Downtown and in Hollywood and the Eastside. Other community groups that said they intend to sponsor districts include the Dunbar Economic Development Corp. for about 50 vendors in South-Central Los Angeles, the African-American Marketplace for 100 vendors in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Southwest Los Angeles, Build Plus in Watts for 50 vendors, and Los Angeles Mission College for 50 vendors in the northeast San Fernando Valley.

The vending districts will be established as a two-year pilot program, to be extended and expanded to other neighborhoods if the City Council deems them a success.

Councilman Nate Holden was the most outspoken critic of the vending proposal--predicting that vendors would interpret the council action as a legalization of all street vending. “It’s going to be completely out of control,” Holden said. “But my bleeding heart friends are going to vote for it anyway.”

But Councilman Richard Alarcon, who sponsored the ordinance, said it was the best hope for controlling a practice that had not been reduced by a strict prohibition. “These men and women are only interested in making a better life for their families,” Alarcon said. “They are not interested in being dependent on government.”

Voting against the ordinance were council members Holden, Joel Wachs, Hal Bernson and Rudy Svorinich Jr. Councilwoman Rita Walters was absent.