Ice cream trucks will again be allowed to operate in Riverside following the village board’s most recent discussion of food truck licensing regulations on Thursday, April 16. That discussion may be its last before the village passes an ordinance putting the matter to rest.
With trustees having reached a consensus on the rules for food trucks contracted for a special event in February, Community Development Director Anne Cyran asked the board to weigh in on a few open threads for food trucks seeking to be licensed as a business for daily operation.
“There was an issue that was previously mentioned by staff but not discussed by the board,” Cyran said. “The issue is whether the owner of a multi-unit commercial shopping center should be able to wave the 100-foot separation requirement between a food truck on their property and a brick-and-mortar restaurant on the same property. The one example of this would be the Shining Smiles shopping center” at the corner of Harlem Avenue and Longcommon Road.
She said she also sought the board’s feedback on whether to allow ice cream trucks and mobile bicycle units with food storage space to operate in Riverside. Finally, she asked trustees to determine whether licensed food trucks should have a strict timeframe within which to operate, possibly from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m.
The board agreed to limiting the hours, with a carve-out for food truck owners to request exceptions, as in Trustee Elizabeth Kos’s example of a truck serving coffee that might like to open earlier in the morning.
The board also agreed to allow ice cream trucks, or any truck selling frozen desserts, as well as food bicycles, to operate only while stationary to reduce the risk of traffic collisions, like with a child running into the road to catch an ice cream truck.
But on the topic of allowing a food truck at the Shining Smiles plaza, the board was split on whether the property owner should require the permission of the existing restaurant. At first, four trustees — Cristin Evans, Jill Mateo, Joseph Fitzgerald and Aberdeen Marsh-Ozga — said they would not want to allow the property owner to skirt the best interest of the brick-and-mortar operator.
“I would say yes if the brick-and-mortar restaurant agrees, for each case,” Mateo said.
Village President Doug Pollock turned to Village Attorney Bob Pickrell to ask whether Riverside, as a regulatory body, should consider the restaurant tenant to have agency in the legal sense.
“I would not want to cede regulatory authority to any individual up or down on this,” Pickrell said. “[The restaurant] can speak out about it. It can be a factor that we consider, but I think it would ultimately be up to the village board to approve it, not the neighbor.”
“In that case, I would change my answer to no. I would not be in favor of it,” Marsh-Ozga said. “The restaurant owner leased the space with the expectation of it being a certain way. If there’s only one restaurant space in the plaza, and they’ve leased it, then they have an expectation that they’re going to be able to operate in a certain way without direct competition.”
Kos said the presence of a food truck could instead be collaborative if it offered another specialty separate from the existing restaurant, which sells Thai food and sushi, though Marsh-Ozga said it would take parking spaces away for potential customers.
After much discussion, Pollock asked Pickrell to look further into whether the village could legally ask the tenant to weigh in on the matter or not due to the private nature of its lease and a potential agreement with a food truck.
In the meantime, Riverside’s planning and zoning commission and preservation commission will each take one final look at the standards the board agreed to before an ordinance is presented for passage by trustees.
Milad Nourahmadi, the owner of the Shining Smiles plaza, told the Landmark he might be interested in leasing space to a licensed food truck, depending on the circumstances.
“I’d be open to hearing about it and seeing how something like that could work. I’m not opposed to food trucks, but I guess it would have to be something that would work where it doesn’t disrupt our normal traffic,” Nourahmadi said. “It would have to be something that I would have to make sure the tenants are OK with … The existing tenants would come first.”
