Chris Winterhack
The city refined its process for allotting spots on Library Mall and Capitol Square.
Nat Hanson, owner of WeGo Waffles, has had more than a few struggles since launching his business last year. After buying his food cart, he discovered that the previous owner had failed to disclose a number of serious structural problems, including fire damage. “I spent between $6,000 and $7,000 getting it up to code,” Hanson tells Isthmus. And he narrowly missed his chance to compete for a coveted downtown vending spot in 2016 after a finicky water pump caused him to fail his health inspection just a day before the city’s review period began.
So for the past year, Hanson has been trying to make a living selling his Belgian-style waffles at a few different locations, popping up on West Dayton Street near the UW-Madison campus and outside bars on the city’s east side. Now he’s taking another swing at the city’s review process — something he says could be make-or-break for his fledgling business. “If I get a spot on the Square or Library Mall this year, it will all be worth it,” he says.
WeGo Waffles is one of more than 60 food carts that participated in the city’s annual review, which took place this year Oct. 1-22. A tradition thought to be unique to Madison, the review is a massive undertaking, carried out by a panel of about 30 judges who sample food from each cart during the four-week review period. Judges then assign scores based on how they like the food, customer service and overall appearance of the cart out of a possible 100. Only carts that score an average of 70 points or higher are considered for spots on Library Mall and the Square.
“This is part of what makes our scene unique,” says Meghan Blake-Horst, the city’s vending coordinator. “[The review] gives our community some ownership of the process.”
When Blake-Horst stepped into her position in December 2016, the dust was still settling from last year’s review period, when results sparked criticism from vendors who felt the process was unfair to new carts. Among the most vocal was Joshua Barraza of El Grito, a popular cart that lost its Capitol Square spot after scoring poorly with judges. Barraza said that the city’s practice of assigning seniority points to established carts pushed out new vendors. To address those concerns and others, Blake-Horst held a series of focus groups, surveys and community input meetings to help improve the process, which is governed by city ordinance.
“Being new in the position was helpful because I had a different perspective and had never done [the review] before,” she says. “We tried to get input in a multitude of ways [and] ended up getting a lot of feedback.”
Established carts previously got up to seven seniority points added to their raw score, which sometimes provided a big boost in the rankings, Blake-Horst says. Now, carts get a maximum of five seniority points, and the points are only applied during the second round of scoring, when carts that already made it onto the Mall-Concourse get to choose specific spots. “It made [the review] more equitable and leveled the playing field,” Blake-Horst says.
Blake-Horst also applied the city’s equity tool when planning the review overhaul, which led to greater diversity among judges. This was also the first year that judges had to apply to conduct the review. The other big change this year was the length of the review period — it’s now four weeks instead of two, which gave judges more time to assess the carts and gave new carts (which vend on Saturdays during the review period as a sort of “tryout”) more opportunities to be judged. Scores and feedback are now entered digitally, which helps speed up the tabulation process. Results will be posted on Nov. 11.
Not all cart-owners liked the longer review period, Blake-Horst says, but overall the feedback on the new process has been positive. And she says her department will continue to examine ways to make the process more equitable and to engage more segments of the community.
“It’s a privilege to be using the public space,” she says. “So having to work and earn that is about as fair as we can get.”
