Los Angeles taco trucks can stay put again, judge rules

Remember a bunch of stories we did this year about taco trucks in Los Angeles, which local restaurant owners were complaining had an unfair competitive advantage?

Well, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge Wednesday overturned a controversial ordinance passed in April by county supervisors that made it a misdemeanor in unincorporated parts of the county to park a taco truck in one spot for more than an hour, Garrett Therolf reports.

Which means that East L.A's taco trucks are back in full force -- at least for now. Therolf writes:

The language of the ordinance, Judge Dennis A. Aichroth said, was "vague" and therefore "unconstitutional" in its description of how quickly a vendor could return to an area where the truck was previously parked. Aichroth said it also violated the vehicle code because county supervisors had not properly established that it was written in the interest of public safety.

The attorney who won the case on behalf of Margarita Garcia, a ticketed taco vendor whose violation was dismissed by Aichroth, said he expected that the county would try to rewrite the law. "It'll probably be just as miserable as the one they just wrote," said Philip C. Greenwald, who represents a newly formed association of catering truck operators. "They won't win."

Click here to visit the SaveOurTacoTrucks.org website, maintained by two Highland Park taco lovers.

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

Photo: Alex Yoo enjoys some chow at a taco truck on Olympic Boulevard in East Los Angeles, the epicenter of the battle between mobile food vendors and brick-and-mortar restaurants, whose owners say the trucks enjoy an unfair competitive advantage. Credit: Alex Gallardo / Los Angeles Times

Comments

[Terris Linenbach]

The simple solution is to tax the truck owners to operate a rolling restaurant. They must have a sticker or they will be shut down.

It makes sense to tax them because they are using the common good for their own profits. Sidewalk and streets as well as law and order.

[Erik Self]

Does it really matter what the law says --the taco truck owners will do as they please anyway's just as the gardeners do when they break the law and use those loud lawn and leaf blowers wasnt' there suppossed to be a law against those --talk about flauting the law--- go on live la vida loca it wont benefit the rule of law and well all suffer for it in the end.