L.A. City Councilman Tom LaBonge, saying the new food trucks that have popped up on the Westside are “unfair” to established restaurants, acknowledged that he has forwarded restaurants’ complaints to the Police Department.
And the police, in turn, have been rousting the trucks in recent weeks by issuing tickets, many for minor violations. Truck owners contend the police are trying to shoo them off the Miracle Mile where they tend to cluster near a row of established restaurants.
That has led to complaints that the Police Department is being used to stifle business competition.
“The way the laws are written it seems like the police could come out at any time and find something wrong with any vehicle on the street,” said Teddy Lawrence, owner of King Kone, a soft-serve ice-cream truck. “But the police shouldn’t be a security force for the restaurant owners that feel threatened by our competition.”
The proliferation of the food trucks within the last year has led to some tense noontimes on the Miracle Mile. The trucks, updated versions of L.A.’s old staple of taco trucks, serve everything from organic food to Korean barbecue and sometimes use Twitter to tell their fans where they’ll park next.
But their popularity has created a vanload of questions: Are the low-cost food trucks fundamentally unfair to restaurants, which are saddled with higher costs? If so, should police get involved in what is, after all, a matter of business competition? And so long as the trucks are legally selling food to a waiting line of customers, should regulations be created to codify some rules of the road?
For his part, LaBonge answers “yes” to the first two questions.
“The whole point of the taco truck was to allow for places without restaurants to offer something to eat, but parking right outside is unfair to the restaurant owners who have made a commitment to that area and pay the higher costs in doing so.”
But Adam Summers, a policy analyst with the free-market Reason Foundation in Los Angeles, said that the opposition to the food trucks is a waste of time for city officials, police and restaurant owners.
“I would hope that the city would have bigger policy issues to deal with, and police should be told to focus on more serious crime,” Summers said.
“The restaurant owners should instead be trying to win customers through better food, prices and service, and embrace the competition because the free market is what we are supposed to believe in this country.”
Ground zero
The conflict isn’t exactly new. The popularity of taco trucks, which typically sell low-priced Mexican fare, drove a feud last year in East Los Angeles when restaurant owners essentially made the same argument, calling the trucks unfair competition. But efforts in getting stricter city and county regulations on the trucks into law ultimately were unsuccessful.
Now the controversy has jumped to the Westside, where more gourmet food trucks are rolling out than ever. Ground zero for the trucks’ lunchtime hotspot is Miracle Mile’s Museum Row, where thousands of office tower workers have a choice of only a handful of nearby eateries. Some days, almost a dozen trucks dot the surrounding four-block radius.
The first major police sweep occurred Aug. 19, when one truck was impounded because the driver didn’t have a valid California driver’s license and others got tickets for not having valid business permits. But the long trucks can get ticketed because they poke into a second parking space or for any number of other reasons.
Capt. Eric Davis of the LAPD’s Wilshire Division, which patrols the area, defended the police’s actions, saying they are not harassing the truck owners and denies that the department is being used by the restaurants to shoo away the food truck competition.
“We are just doing our job, which is to go out into the community and check into complaints,” Davis said. “The trucks have the right to be there of course, but some of them were not following the parking laws or missing health department permits.”
Restaurant owners on Miracle Mile said they usually pay about $18,000 a month for rent plus fees for various health and safety permits, and contend the trucks’ costs are one-tenth what they incur. The area mainly bustles only during business hours, so lunchtime crowds are vital for the restaurants to survive but have shrunk with layoffs and patrons tightening their wallets.
“It’s almost like a vulture mentality,” said Alan Watts, senior vice president of operations for Koo Koo Roo, which has a location where food trucks frequent. Watts denies calling police. “We understand that more choices would be good for the people working there. But we don’t think it’s right to just park right in front and steal business we’ve cultivated.”
The police sweeps were somewhat effective in scaring off at least some trucks.
“After the crackdown, most of us spread throughout the area but wouldn’t park near the restaurants because we knew they were watching us,” said Lawrence of King Kone, which hasn’t received any citations.
For now, though, it looks like the cat and mouse game between the trucks and those that oppose them won’t be settled by city regulation.
LaBonge said he doesn’t plan on submitting any ordinance to the City Council that would regulate the food trucks. But he hopes to arrange for a dialogue between the restaurant owners, food truck vendors, local patrons, and police over a potential compromise that could ease the tension.
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s office said in a statement that he did not have a stance on the issue as of yet, but did say the mayor is studying the matter.
Meanwhile, some of the mobile food trucks have slowly returned to the Miracle Mile area, but are always ready to roll if police sweep by.
“I’ve had some of the restaurant managers confront me and tell me to get out,” said Phuc Tran, a co-owner of the Marked5 food truck, which serves Asian-American cuisine on buns made of rice. “But they can’t keep the demand down, so we’ll keep coming to supply the people’s craving and just be extremely cautious about avoiding trouble with police.”
