Vending ordinance awaits hearing

Angry students and community members formed a coalition to defeat the controversial legislation. As vendors await the City Council hearing that will determine their future presence on campus, they united with students and community members against the legislation while University officials continued to support it. The ordinance -- which Councilwoman Janie Blackwell proposed at last Wednesday's Council meeting -- would limit and reorganize street and sidewalk vending across campus. If it becomes law, it will consolidate vending in three primary areas -- on 34th, Walnut and Spruce Streets. Council members must read the ordinance by June 12 and vote on it by the 19th, but official dates have yet to be set. It is also uncertain which committee of the Council the ordinance will be assigned to. The General Committee, the Streets and Services, Licenses and Inspection and Rules committees are all possibilities. Members of the newly founded Penn Consumers' Alliance to Save Food Trucks -- which consists of concerned University graduates and undergraduates, faculty and community residents -- met on Monday night to form a strategy to oppose the ordinance. "I think [the ordinance] is more of a show of force that the University has power," Bioengineering graduate student Bryon Gomberg said. "I can't think of why they would care so much. It's not that many trucks." The group -- voicing concern over the University's motives of health and safety and their lack of input in the University's decision process -- invited neither University Vice President for Government, Community and Public Affairs Carol Scheman nor Scott Goldstein of the University City Vendors Alliance to the meeting, although he did attend. "I would go, but I wasn't invited," Scheman said. "They seem more interested in talking without the facts than with the facts." But members asserted that they held the meeting to organize themselves against the ordinance, stating the new vending locations, student representation and the preservation of competition are not satisfactory. Goldstein said the Alliance would not actively oppose the ordinance but added that the group wanted to make changes to the Memorandum of Understanding -- the last two pages of the ordinance which include the relocation sites the University promised the vendors. Specifically, vendors would be willing to vacate the blockfaces of 36th and 37th streets on both sides of Walnut if the University gave them the 3400 to 3600 block of Walnut and the area by Van Pelt along the lower 3700 block of Walnut. The vendors would also agree to give up the Hill field relocation site if these conditions were met. Goldstein and others at the meeting voiced concern as to whether the Memorandum of Understanding will be legally binding if the ordinance is passed by the Council. According to Scheman, the compromises written in the memorandum will only become binding when both the University and the vendors sign it. Currently, neither side has done so. But Scheman added that she stands ready to sign the agreement. The Penn Consumers' Alliance also decided to lobby Council members who might vote on the ordinance, send electronic mail messages to the University community, hand out flyers, start a new web page and contact West Philadelphia community organizations in order to gain momentum to defeat the ordinance. "No ordinance is satisfactory to us," physics graduate student Alex Welte said.