well hopefully $43,000 isn't going to kill any of the street food
Pilot project winners face $43,000 fee for curbside parking
Fees for sidewalk cart vendors start at just $1,000 a year
The City of Vancouver is holding a lottery to award the following sidewalk and curbside locations to mobile food vendors.
Photograph by: Sungraphics, Vancouver Sun files
The winning applicants in the city's street food pilot project will face parking fees of at least $43,200 to secure the coveted downtown curbside locations through the end of April 2011.
Vancouver is accepting applications from mobile food vendors to fill 14 sidewalk spaces and three curbside spaces mostly on the downtown peninsula, Kitsilano Beach and Spanish Banks. The process is part of a pilot project intended to diversify the selection of healthy local foods available on the street beyond the current roster of hotdogs, popcorn and chestnuts.
All the spaces will be awarded by lottery, but the winning applicants for curbside spaces will be able to choose between a prime downtown location with metered parking or a non-metered location outside the downtown core. The city intends to recover all potential revenue from those metered spaces at a cost of $2,400 per month per metered space, said Grant Woff, Vancouver's acting manager of streets administration. A typical catering truck will require two to three parking spaces for the nine-month trial.
Applicants who win the right to a curbside location can opt for the less desirable non-metered space for a flat fee of $1,500 for the nine-month duration of the pilot.
"The only way we would agree to take one of those [metered] spaces is as a loss leader," said Jason Apple of Roaming Dragon, a truck-based gourmet Asian fusion food vendor doing business at Richmond's Night Market. "We would do it just to be the first gourmet food truck downtown, but it doesn't make a whole lot of economic sense."
Apple said that a vendor paying for metered parking space would have to sell 60 to 70 meals a day to cover that expense alone.
All street vendors are subject to a $1,004 annual licence fee.
Add to that the $125,000 to $200,000 cost of a catering truck and a commercial kitchen for food preparation and profit seems unlikely, Apple said. Nonetheless, Apple and his partner Jory Simkin are each preparing applications for the maximum of three locations.
All 17 vending locations will be awarded in a lottery to take place July 9. Two of those 14 sidewalk spaces are big enough to accommodate a small van or trailer with no additional fees beyond the annual street vendor permit fee paid by all of the city's 60 licensed street food vendors. The other 12 spaces will be awarded to vendors selling from mobile carts, generally measuring no more than 2.6 metres wide. A well-outfitted vending cart, with sink and refrigeration, costs $20,000 or more, said Apple.
The low cost of street vendor permits has long been an irritant to downtown businesses and restaurants, said Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association executive director Charles Gauthier.
"It's not that we object to street vendors, but we want those rates to be much higher," said Gauthier. "It's never going to get close to what a restaurant is going to pay in rent and property taxes, but three dollars a day [licence fee] is not much overhead."
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http://www.vancouversun.com/opinion/...877/story.html
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