David Michael Miller
While Madison is attempting to expand options for food carts this spring, the city of Middleton is going the other way.
An April 2016 mobile food vending ordinance restricts where carts can vend and raises the city’s annual licensing fee from $50 to $500.
The ordinance, which was amended earlier this month, has made it impractical for most food carts to do business in Middleton.
“We are not Madison. These food carts don’t have a Library Mall that they can go set up at and sell five days a week,”says Cyndi Pisani of Capital Brewery, which has hosted food carts in its biergarten. “They go from charging [almost] nothing to charging $500. I thought that was a bit high.”
Prior to April 2016, Middleton had no regulations specifically governing food carts, says city administrator Mike Davis.
Hans Hilbert, Middleton alder and chair of the city’s license and ordinance committee, says the request for new rules came from city staffers: “We had carts asking about licensing, and the only [ordinance that] was applicable was the direct seller’s permit, which didn’t really fit.”
During the process of drafting the ordinance, brick-and-mortar restaurants were “concerned that the city could be creating the situation where [it] could be subsidizing the use of public property to take away business from taxpaying businesses in the city,” says Hilbert.
The ordinance restricts mobile food vending in Middleton to private property and requires the $500 yearly license as well as a background check. Carts can also pay $250 to vend one time only at a special event.
Hilbert says the committee did look at what fees are charged in nearby communities. “Much like any fee or when you have to put a number on something, it’s a little bit like throwing a dart at the dartboard and seeing where it ends up. We kinda hit $500 and some people said, ‘Yeah that seems right,’ and other people said ‘That seems high,’” says Hilbert. “The fact that people were talking about it seemed like we probably found a good number.”
In fact, Hilbert says the $500 is intentionally high, enough that food carts “have to consider what their role in the community ultimately is going to be.”
“I would not say we are trying to drive them out or we’re not welcoming them,” says Hilbert. “What we are doing is responding to brick-and-mortar restaurants that pay property taxes and guarantee their businesses are going to be there, open and available.”
The fee is also meant to encourage carts to vend often: “At that level, you are making a commitment that you are going to be there and operate,” Hilbert says.
Christine Ameigh, owner of Slide Food Cart and organizer of Let’s Eat Out neighborhood food cart nights, says the increase in the licensing fee ended that group’s weekly Middleton night. It’s also made it impractical for carts to sell for school fundraisers, another popular function.
Let’s Eat Out rotates carts in different spots on different nights; in that way Middleton would get a greater variety of carts over the course of a summer. But it means that a single cart might vend only about four times a year for three hours. “It might not even make the $500 fee back,” says Ameigh.
In comparison, Waunakee charges carts a $25 base fee with another $25 charge each day a cart vends, while Sun Prairie charges $150 annually (a reduction from a previous annual fee of $300).
When Ameigh found out about the proposed fee hike in spring of 2016, she went to the next Middleton council meeting to explain the carts’ situation. But “it seems like they already had their minds made up,” she says. “If I’d known sooner, we would have rallied more people to attend and have this conversation.”
Ameigh says that if a cart decided to be in Middleton “for lunch five days a week in the different office parks, then that’s not a bad deal. There’s a lot of office parks in Middleton you could go to.”
The new ordinance also hampers the ability of Capital Brewery — which has no restaurant of its own — to host food carts and area restaurants at its biergarten, which it has been doing three nights a week in warm weather.
These food carts and food stands operated by Middleton restaurants have become popular hallmarks of the biergarten, says Cyndi Pisani, Capital’s director of marketing and special events.
But now even the restaurants are classified as mobile food vendors and must pay the $500 license to sell inside the biergarten. “We have a lot at stake with this,” says Pisani.
The ordinance grants a work-around for carts to vend at Capital by allowing them to set up in a pavilion in Capital’s parking lot, without needing to pay for a license. But Pisani says that’s not really practical for restaurants, which don’t have carts, and she is concerned about safety: “A little kid is running across the parking lot to get a burger and a car doesn’t see him.”
Pisani says local businesses are losing out because of these new regulations. “It’s much more beneficial for the food vendors to be within the biergarten than in the parking lot.”
