Food truck owners and operators have entered into a dialogue with the City of Kodiak, in order to find common ground with the city’s plan to open up spots for food truck parking.
Diane Million of the Million Recipes food truck and the Kodiak Chamber of Commerce met with Kodiak City Manager Mike Twenge during the chamber’s monthly meeting to discuss the technical aspects of such a plan. According to Million, who is a member of the chamber, one of the more important aspects of the plan was the requirement that food trucks move every 12 hours.
“And they also weren’t aware of how difficult it is sometimes to move your cart. So the board discussed it. And it sounds like what we’re going to do now is having more in depth discussion between actual, you know, people that run food carts for a living, and the city manager. So there’s more understanding on their part of what we need, or what we go through or what requirements we have,” Million said.
According to Million, food trucks only need to move once every two years, for an inspection by the fire chief. For her, it’s a three-hour process to break down the food truck- those are hours that she pays her employees for, all without making any revenue. Doing that on a daily basis would be prohibitively expensive.
The current plan would see the city making 10 sites available for food trucks. It would also require $500 licenses to operate on city property. Currently, all food trucks operate on private property- presumably with deals with the respective private property owners.
Million says she likes the idea, but believes there is more to be discussed.
“As of right now, it’s just in dialogue. It’s all going to be discussed in a couple more meetings, and maybe we’ll have a better idea. I mean, it’s a great idea. Having a food truck court would be really cool. But you have to nail down the schedule, you’d have to nail down the enforcement of the schedule and how things work. And who’s going to do that? And timing- people don’t want to move their food cart every 12 to 24 hours. It’s a lot of work,” Million said.
There is not a set date for a follow up meeting with the city, but Million expects that the city’s food truck plan will be the topic of meetings to come.