The St. Joseph Village Board of Trustees will discuss a moratorium on food trucks at the July board meeting, according to Mayor Tami Fruhling-Voges.
“We want to do everything right now to help our businesses to hang in there,” Fruhling-Voges said.
She expects the moratorium to extend through the end of the pandemic, but said she would also like to see trustees put a date to revisit the issue on the table.
The discussion was prompted after Piato Cafe Food Truck posted that they would visit St. Joseph on June 15.
While the Village does not have an ordiance on food trucks in the Village, Piato Cafe was told they could not come to serve dinner.
The confusion came after a Village committee met in February to gather input from local business owners and employees regarding their concerns and opinions on the topic. Restaurant owners expressed that they were against food trucks in the Village of St. Joseph.
A policy was not established and passed by the Village board at the time, though.
“That’s one of those things that should have probably been done a few years back. “If you don’t have a policy of some sort, then you really can’t prevent them from coming in.
“Our community really needs to decide how we want to control that because there is a concern on how it affects your brick and mortar businesses.”
Restaurant owners echoed similar concerns Tuesday night.
Having put thousands of dollars into their establishments, the restaurant owners feel that because they pay real estate taxes and support other community programs, the Village should provide optimal conditions for their business to survive.
“Being a small community you know it is a tight business to ride,” Fruhling-Voges said.
“Their main concern is just that it’s not really a level playing field with a food truck because, you know, they’re really not in the community. I mean, they just basically roll in and, of course ,the overhead on a food truck is far less than the overhead of a restaurant, plus your employees. If you’re a brick and mortar restaurant you pay your employees that are, a lot of times, local you know people who live in the community.”
She added that many local restaurants are likely to give back to athletic teams and community events because the owners or managers live in the community.
Even though restaurants can move into Phase 4 of the Restore Illinois plan on Friday, limited indoor seating will continue to cause stress on the businesses financially. Fruhling-Voges said it is important to the Village to support those businesses during this time.
When the board approaches the topic, they will talk about an ordinance that will benefit the Village in collecting sales tax or fees to sell food in Village limits. They will also discuss where the food trucks will be allowed to sell food.
“You do have to have something set in place to make sure that that happens,” Fruhling-Voges said.
Fruhling-Voges has talked to other communities to get a sense of what their policies look like. With three new board members since the fall 2019, and the COVID-19 pandemic, the issue got put on the back burner, but when the Piato’s Cafe Food Truck issue came up, Fruhling-Voges knew that it was time to broach the topic again.
She believes that trustees will do more research into what having food trucks within the Village while the moratorium is in place.
“I told them they need to set a date, so that we could have a date that we’re going to go back to revisit it,” she said. “I don’t want it to just be put on the back burner and then never get addressed again. It’s been put on the back burner for too long already.”
