08/23/2023
Fox12 news report takes the time to capture this moment of unfairness. What we hope our City of Vancouver gains from this is, we are trying to bring something good and exciting to our community, and would like more organization and increase of communication between all the different departments we had to go through in order to open. All the green lights given to us are useless now that we are having to close so suddenly. Adding rules and regulations that were not even solidly emplaced on their website/handbook, but expected us to follow? If not we had to shut down immediately as we were not being “compliant”. The amount of times we were told we were going to be shut down by the city or told by property owner that we had to vacate the lot was humiliating. We asked many times how can we be complaint, but city themselves oftentimes didn’t even know what codes we were breaking. We felt experiment on as they tried to figure out what exactly they wanted from a food pod. We were only a year old, and with the winter months to come, we are put in a difficult position to maintain permanently closed. We encourage lot owners, who plan to host food carts, to properly investigate all the permitting needed before advertising food carts to invest thousands of dollars to set-up camp. This is causing, anger, sadness, frustration, and scary emotions as we are unsure of what the future holds for us. It is also devastating that so many small businesses were impacted at once, creating such a massive commotion and bad representation of the city we all call home.
Food cart owners in Vancouver are speaking out after they were asked to foot a bill for a traffic impact fee.
