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Others, such as Keefer, say it doesn't go far enough. He wants the trucks banned from downtown altogether except for the dedicated parking zones. "We are paying for the Fire Department, Police Department, streets and sanitation, schools, in the form of $70,000 a year in property taxes," said Keefer. "When you add all these fees up it is phenomenal and theirs are minuscule." But food truck owners say the proposed ordinance favors Goliath over David. "Without lifting that 200-foot rule it will be almost impossible for people to sustain a business," said Tiffany Kurtz, the owner of Flirty Cupcakes, which sells designer cupcakes with names like Paradise Island from a pale blue truck. Le said the GPS requirement will certainly mean being ticketed whether she does anything wrong. "I do catering all the time to businesses that are next to restaurants. So if I pull up and drop off a catering order, a restaurant owner can call the cops on me," she said. Truck operators say they feel the GPS and 200-feet requirements are a result of the restaurant industry's political influence, or clout as they call it here. "It feels like a lot is being done to protect them that you don't see in other industries," said Kurtz, who also owns a bakery in the city's Little Italy neighborhood. "You look at Peapod (and) they're not saying, `You cannot deliver five blocks from a grocery store.'" On Thursday, a City Council committee is expected to hear the mayor's ordinance and food truck and restaurant owners will have their chance to make their case. The full council could vote on the proposal as soon as next week. Alderman Scott Waguespack, who drafted his own ordinance before the mayor submitted his, has a message for food truck operations: Accept the ordinance and fight the parts they don't like in court. In Los Angeles, a rule regulating how close food trucks could park to restaurants was thrown out of court years ago. Last year in El Paso, Texas, officials did the same thing after a federal lawsuit challenged its 1,000-foot rule. As for Keefer, even as he's fighting the food truck operators he's thinking about joining them. He even bought a domain name
-- WeckWagon.com -- named after a beef sandwich he sells. "Before I open up another cafe I would certainly get a food truck," he said. "I didn't buy a domain name for nothing."
[Associated
Press;
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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