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Patrick Michels went to yesterday’s City Plan Commission meeting, where food trucks in the Arts District were among the items on the menu. Next stop, city council — next month, all goes according to plan. A big reason this got rolling was Arts District exec director Veletta Forsythe Lill, also a former council member. And this morning, in the comments, she cautions: This isn’t quite a done-deal, not just yet:
We still have a lot of work to do, including a public hearing before the City Council to change our zoning to allow food trucks in our neighborhood. We are simultaneously working on other parts of the city code which act as barriers to food trucks — rules such as trucks must move every hour and can only serve a few food types. With changes to those codes food trucks would have more flexibility, not only in the Arts District, but in other areas of town where the zoning already permits food trucks.
This is important to us, but our work will eventually impact many other parts of the city. The real advantage of food trucks is their ability to move to locations based on crowd volume taking advantage of the ebb and flow of audiences — capitalizing on employment centers, entertainment activities, etc. So they could be at in the Arts District for the theater crowd and another part of the city for a bar crowd.
