Six months into 2013 and still unable to legally sell hot dogs on public streets, Mike Bowden has made a decision: If city officials do not reinstate the city’s vending program soon, he and his family will leave Atlanta.
Bowden, who quit his restaurant job to launch Metro City Dogs last year, said his family’s income has dwindled since a lawsuit challenging the privatization of vending led to the city tossing out its public street vending program. The Bowdens’ budgetary problems were compounded when his wife lost her high-paying job last year as well.
“I just don’t want to quit my dream,” said Bowden, who owns two hot dog carts, at a recent public safety committee meeting.
Street vendors, eager to peddle wares such as food, T-shirts and other souvenirs, have been locked in an ongoing battle with city officials over the future of public vending.
The fight began when Mayor Shirley Franklin’s administration, attempting to bring order to the at-times chaotic vending scene, privatized the industry by hiring Chicago-based management company General Growth Properties. Two vendors filed and won a lawsuit against the city challenging that agreement.
But city officials assert that Fulton County Superior Court Judge Shawn Ellen LaGrua’s 2012 ruling, which struck down the city’s contract with General Growth, effectively invalidated the entire vending program. While they work on new guidelines, no public street vending permits have been issued this year.
“All of the vendors have said ‘we want to go back to the old system,’ but I don’t think that will ever happen because the old system was virtually unregulated,” said David Bennett, a senior policy adviser to Mayor Kasim Reed.
Atlanta officials say they plan to issue new guidelines later this year, but add they must navigate a host of considerations such as uniformity, cost and oversight. Officials are grappling with decisions such as building a permanent vendor hub in which they rent out kiosks. But they worry whether there would be enough pedestrian traffic to bring a return on that investment.
City officials must also decide whether to require permanent, temporary and even mobile kiosks or carts, he said.
“People will tell you it’s simple, but it is a very complicated topic with all kinds of moving pieces,” Bennett said. “Every city does it differently because every city is different. What works in Seattle or Portland can’t be moved to Atlanta.”
But for Bowden and vendors like him, the end of the year could be too late.
“I’m constantly going into my savings,” said Georgina Opoku-Afari who, like many, vends souvenirs at Turner Field on game days. “Now I’m in debt.”
Stories like hers were common Monday as dozens of vendors with the Atlanta Vendors Association and their supporters took to City Hall. Bearing signs that read “Mayor Reed let us work” and “Please stop taking bread from my children’s mouths,” the vendors asked city officials to allow them to return to work, and soon.
“You’re starving people,” said Larry Miller, one of two vendors named in the lawsuit against the city. “Put an ordinance in place so that we the people can go back to work and feed our families.”
Community activist Marcus Coleman criticized city officials for the time it has taken to issue a new program.
“It reeks of retaliation for the amount of time it’s taken to get a common-sense law to put people back to work,” Coleman said.
But Bennett says solving the problem requires more than a quick fix.
“The last system took the previous administration two years and ended up (with a lawsuit),” he said. “An answer you could come up with quickly, you wouldn’t want.”
District 4 Councilwoman Cleta Winslow rejects the notion that city officials haven’t worked with vendors.
“I know what the city has done to try and help vendors. We’ve worked with them and done everything we could to make it possible to let them vend,” she said, noting vendors can still sell their goods on private property.
Winslow said vendors were slow to form the Atlanta Vendors Association and self-police those who caused problems.
“I’ve said this to them: Organize so that if vending comes back that you have some control over it, so that you are setting yourself up in a business mode to be respected,” she said. “Not all of the vendors (are disorganized) … but the good had to go with the bad.”
For now, the vendors expect LaGrua to issue another ruling in their favor in coming days or weeks, though according to Bennett that wouldn’t mean they can quickly return to work. The Atlanta City Council must first approve a new program.
Robert Frommer, an attorney with the Institute for Justice who took up the vendors’ cause, said city officials could find a way to let vendors work in the interim.
“If they were acting in good faith, they would let the vendors work while they crafted their unnecessary ordinance,” he said. “These are struggling entrepreneurs. They have families to feed and this thing is killing them.”
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