Fontana wants to reimburse street vendors

Like a lot of cities, Fontana has become populated with sidewalk vendors, and it wants to get them under control.

City officials believe they have found a way to accomplish that goal: pay those vendors – in particular, those who serve full meals for customers sitting at makeshift tables – to be legitimate, city-sanctioned businesses.

Fontana recently adopted the Sidewalk Vendor Reimbursement Program, which will pay vendors up to $2,000 to operate with an official city business permit, exactly like a brick-and-mortar operation.

That figure will cover insurance costs along with the cost of permits from the city and San Bernardino County, said Phil Burum, Fontana’s assistant city manager.

The reimbursement program, which was posted on the city’s website on May 30, has yet to attract any applicants. Assuming it does it probably won’t eliminate all unlicensed vendors, but it will make the practice easier for Fontana’s code enforcement department to regulate.

“We’re trying to get control of the situation and make sure everything is safe,” Burum said. “We want to get people off the sidewalks so they’re not running into each other, and not eating at a place where you can’t wash your hands or go to the bathroom.”

The reimbursement program will also get Fontana tax revenue from a business practice that has been around for years and that grew during the pandemic when lot of restaurants were forced to close.

“What we have is a lot of businesses operating illegally in Fontana, and we have to do something about that,” Mayor Acquanetta Warren said. “They carry all of their stuff in a U-Haul, find a place on the sidewalk, and then set up.

As many as five or six vendors sometimes set up shop in the same area, making it difficult for people to move along the sidewalk.

“Not all of these vendors are mom-and-pops,” Burum said. “Some of them have up to 20 people, and [the owner’s] business model is they make a lot of money and they don’t pay very much.”

In September 2018, then-Gov. Jerry Brown signed SB 946, better known as the Safe Sidewalk Vending Act.

That law did away with all criminal penalties related to sidewalk vending. It did, however, allow local governments to adopt non-punitive measures to regulate the practice if those regulations helped ensure public health and safety.

Fines of no more than $1,000 are allowed but are limited to anyone who operates repeatedly without a permit.

Concerns about public safety are a primary reason Fontana is willing to pay vendors up to $2,000 each to, in effect regulate themselves.

“Most people won’t go to a restaurant with a C or a D rating,” Warren said. “Why would you go to [an unregulated] place that doesn’t have a bathroom or a refrigerator.”

The city’s regulations are spelled out on its website and are clearly aimed at making sidewalk vending safe not only for the patrons but the vendors as well.

An “online booklet” addresses two categories of vendors: stationary, meaning anyone who sells food or merchandise from a fixed location, and roaming vendors, meaning those that sell their goods while moving from one location to another, either by foot or by a mode of transportation approved by the city.

To be eligible for a permit, a vendor must have no more than five employees and be operating at the time the permit application is submitted. The vendor must also identify exactly where they intend to conduct business and must not operate out of a food truck.

Pre-packaged foods – frozen or unfrozen – are permitted for sale, as are whole uncut fruits and vegetables. However, anything refrigerated or prepared on-site, like tacos or cut fruit, is prohibited. Unpackaged and/or opened food are also not allowed to be sold on the street.

Besides a city business permit, vendors must get a permit from the San Bernardino County Environmental Health Services for any food preparation or sales.

The business location must be no less than 10 feet from multiple public utilities, including fire hydrants, fire escapes, bus stops, driveways, and loading zones.

For years, California cities have been grappling with how to manage street vendors, a practice that can be traced to the mid-19th century, about the time California became a state.

In Los Angeles, most street vendors were Mexican or Chinese immigrants, and the food became so popular – especially tamale carts – that sidewalk vending became difficult for the city to regulate.

It wasn’t until November 2018, two months after the Safe Sidewalk Vending Act became law, that Los Angeles finally made sidewalk vending legal, despite concerns raised by brick-and-mortar restaurant owners about health and safety issues and unfair competition.

In the Inland Empire, Redlands, Riverside, and San Bernardino are among the Inland Empire cities in the past few years that have taken steps to control sidewalk vendors, but no other city anywhere has tried financial payments to achieve that goal, according to Burum.

“I don’t want to sound too negative because we’re still trying to get the word out, but it could be that not many vendors will go for this,” Burum said. “Because if they do they’ll have to pay taxes and follow some regulations,.”