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Whatever rules Manteca council adopts for food trucks they won’t have any bite
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Before the Manteca City Council completely opens Pandora’s Box regarding food trucks, let’s look at the uneven playing field they will be creating once they lift the 10-minute rule that is rarely — if ever — enforced against food trucks that linger too long in one spot. 

Just what rules do you have to play by in Manteca if you want to open a restaurant?

First you just can’t locate it anywhere. The city, at the insistence of its citizens, adopts zoning that restricts where you can open a restaurant.

You also don’t simply go on e-Bay like a potential food truck vendor can, bid on a used food truck for $50,000, spend a week or so getting it ready to serve food and then you’re open for business.

Consider what Panera Bread had to do. First they had to make sure the city blessed the looks and placement of the restaurant they ended up building on East Yosemite Avenue that cost in excess of $1 million to open. The city has no such rules when it comes to what a food truck looks like or how large it can be in relation to places where the owners want to park it.

Panera had to comply to setback rules from neighboring properties. Food trucks do not. Panera also had to provide adequate off-street parking and could not count on-street parking to meet their required parking needs. Not only do food trucks not have to have off-street parking but they could very well take over on-street parking that never was designed to serve as a place to conduct commerce.

Panera Bread had to landscape their restaurant site. Food trucks do not. Panera Bread had to provide adequate seating for patrons. Food trucks do not. Panera Bread has to provide visually pleasing trash enclosures and trash cans for customers that complement their site architecture. Food trucks that bother to have trash cans for their customers can buy one at Home Depot.

Panera Bread had to comply with established traffic circulation patterns when it came to having customers drive into or out of their restaurant site. Food trucks aren’t required to do that.

Panera Bread had to have paved parking. Food trucks can pull into vacant lots and their customers do likewise.

Panera Bread doesn’t dare put up signs in violation of the city sign ordinance. With food trucks it is anything goes.

It is also clear where Panera Bread makes its taxable sales. This isn’t a small issue given taxable sales at restaurants are the second largest source of sales tax in Manteca and sales tax is the biggest source of income the city has to pay for day-to-day municipal operations such as police and fire protection, street and park maintenance, general government, and such. Food trucks move from town-to-town making an audit of where they collected their sales tax — assuming they collected all taxes as required by law — virtually impossible.

The list goes on and on.

Our elected leaders get the public’s hunger for food trucks. But before they rush to satisfy that appetite they need to realize the dangers of opening Pandora’s Box given the odds of whatever rules they ultimately may adopt regarding food truck regulations may never be enforced making all of the posturing they go through a sham at best.

If any of them doubt that, they might want to ask Mayor Ben Cantu about the city’s wonderful lackluster performance over the years at enforcing issues such as landscaping and sign requirements on brick and mortar businesses.

Oh, wait, that’s right. They do enforce violations if someone rat finks. Let’s hope that the culture of adopting laws and then seeing no evil doesn’t spread to other city operations such as the police department. Can you imagine how much more chaotic the streets would be if Manteca Police traffic officers did not enforce the law against acts of speeding and stop sign running they witness but instead required a citizen who sees the same exact violation to tell them about it first before they enforce the law?

There are a number of places over the years where city required landscaping was put in place and then ripped out years later and either the area paved over, replaced with artificial turf that adds new meaning to the concept of cheap looking or has been simply left to die and turn into a barren mess. If you think as a citizen you can step up and drive around town turning in examples of the city not enforcing their rules then you’re overlooking Manteca’s rich history of when such citizen code enforcers surface to dismiss them as ax grinders.

Before the council spends too much time mulling over food truck rules, they might want to go back about five years and see what good it did a committee of a half dozen business people and community members to spend 18 months at the direction of the City Council fashioning rules for A-frame signs, flag pole banner signs, and “human” signs that required a permit and liability insurance on top of restrictions on where they could take over city right of way. When frustrated committee members asked the council why the rules they recommended and that they adopted the elected officials weren’t being enforced — sounding equally indignant — asked staff to explain themselves. The answer has always been the city enforces such zoning rules on a complaint basis only as they lack the manpower to do otherwise.

During the past 25 years Manteca has had no less than three major flare-ups over the unwieldy proliferation of signs that led councils to form citizen sign committees to address public demands. The result has always been the same: A lot of work, even more pontification, and nothing changes.

The danger with the food truck ordinance chances being envisioned that will lift the 10-minute restriction is that it opens the door to another level of food truck engagement of which the city has no stomach to actively enforce whatever rules they adopt.

What the council needs to do so they don’t keep simply appeasing people and enforcing rules that basically everyone including the city will ignore is to address code enforcement.

Code enforcement is working fine today under the rat rink model. For enforcing established community standards it’s a farce.

If council members embrace “its-none-of-the-city’s-business-to-tell-me-what-to-do-with-my-property school of thought then they should feel morally obligated to gut the municipal code of what some refer to as Big Brother regulations enforced only when someone complains.

If not they may rue the day when food trucks are parking on a vacant dirt lot between Panera Bread and Manteca Bowl that has more than two dozen eating establishments running the gamut from Applebee’s and Jamba Juice to Starbucks and Taqueria la Estrella all within a half mile setting the tone for the Family City.

And let’s be clear. The last time the food truck issue came up is when they were parking in the general vicinity where Panera Bread is today for hours on end within close proximity of dozens of food options while helping undermine the city’s push to upgrade the look of the East Yosemite Avenue corridor.

The Manteca Chamber of Commerce is right. Given all of the rules and regulations the city actively imposes on restaurants it would be a gross injustice to allow food trucks to locate in areas that aren’t so-called “food deserts” especially when councils moan and groan about community standards not being met.