LA HABRA : Anti-Vending Law to Get Final City OK

An ordinance prohibiting pushcart and sidewalk vendors from selling merchandise including food, flowers, clothing, magazines and balloons on the city’s streets has been given preliminary approval by the City Council and is expected to receive final approval this week.

The new ordinance would take effect in 30 days.

City officials said the move to enact the anti-pushcart and sidewalk vending law was prompted by residents’ complaints about the vendors.

“These vendors are bused in here (from other cities), they urinate and defecate on our streets and most of them are (undocumented workers) who have no business to be here to begin with,” said Zona Neighbors, a resident who urged the council to pass the ordinance. “I saw one of them defecating in a dumpster in an alley.”

She said she feared that the vendors, especially those selling food, did not meet health and safety codes.

Currently, the city issues business licenses to street vendors at a cost of $200 a year or $100 a day.

Under the new ordinance, people who sell anything on La Habra’s streets or other public property and those who employ people to do so could face imprisonment and have their pushcarts confiscated.

There was no public hearing on the matter and none planned, Mayor David M. Cheverton said.

In a report to the council, City Manager Lee Risner and Police Chief Steven Stavely said the most common complaint of vendors from residents is “the unsightly appearance of carts and apparent failure to meet health and safety code requirements.”

The report further states that allowing “human-powered” or “non-motorized” street vending “is counterproductive to the welfare, safety and good order of the community.”

Seventeen other cities throughout Orange County, including Anaheim and Brea, prohibit pushcart vending, city officials said.

Arturo Montez, urban affairs director for the state League of United Latin American Citizens, called the ordinance “another typical racial baiting by politicians.”

“As long as it’s people of color (doing street vending), they don’t want us in the streets unless it’s in the gutter,” he said.

Risner, however, said the ordinance has no “bearing at all on ethnicity. We cannot tolerate” racism.

Still, Carlos Quinonez, coordinator of the Anaheim Street Vendors Assn., said pushcart vending is “an honest way of making a living. My heart goes out to pushcart and flower vendors . . . If they’re doing things decently and in order, why should anybody try to cut off their livelihood?”