Food Truck Pilot Program Accepting Applications In Lake Forest

LAKE FOREST, IL — Applications for Lake Forest's first 15 food truck permits are being accepted after the City Council unanimously approved a pilot program earlier this month.

The ordinance establishing food truck permits is due to expire at the end of the year, and city officials plan to evaluate how it went.

Mayor George Pandaleon, who encouraged city staff to draw up the plan in time for summer, said the plan was an experiment.

"We want to be like Amazon, we don't want to be like Commonwealth Edison," Pandaleon said before the vote. "That's the whole idea — to learn from doing it."

Applicants must provide a copy of a valid license from a county health department, a description of their vehicles and proof of insurance, as well as acknowledge their obligation to report sales tax to the village.

Each permit allows for up to three vehicles. The $100 fee is waived for local restaurants and food stores holding a valid city-issued health license.

Ald. Melanie Rummel, 2nd Ward, questioned whether the fee might be too steep.

"Do we have any idea what does a taco sell for?" Rummel asked. "How many do you have to do to make up that $100 fee. I wonder if our fee might be a little high. $5? You have to sell a lot of tacos to make up $100."

But 4th Ward Ald. Eileen Weber explained many people purchase three tacos at a time, which adds up quickly when families are buying food.

"I think you'll be pleasantly surprised that it'll be made up quickly," Weber said.

City Attorney Julie Tappendorf said city officials generally do not apply Lake Forest's ban on what its code defines as "transient merchants or itinerant vendors" to food trucks when they operate on private property.

"To the extent that businesses are bringing in food trucks for private events, whether it's a wedding, whether it's for their employees, it doesn't really have the same implications as selling to individual customers. It shouldn't be driving additional traffic," Tappendorf told the council.

"Most communities do not regulate the food trucks that are coming in for a private event," she said. "Some people bring a food truck to their house for a birthday party, or a bar or bat mitzvah, or something along those lines, and the city has not regulated those in the past. We don't consider that the kind of 'sale.' It's more of almost like a catered event as opposed to the 'sale' and so we've just treated them differently."

The pilot plan does not contemplate regulating the operation of food trucks at public events that are hosted on private property, she said.

RELATED: Lake Forest Food Truck Ban Set To Be Lifted, At Least Temporarily

Community Development Director Cathy Czerniak said the city plans to issue the permits in a first-come, first-served manner as applications are received, rather than reserving any for local businesses or certain types of restaurants.

"The thought right now is that we would let it unfold and we would see what we get. If we get all 15 are taco trucks, when we revisit it in 22 we might want to — I don't know, I'd have to look to the city attorney to see if we could classify it by category of food," Czerniak at the June 7 City Council meeting.

"At this point we just really want to see where the interest is. There might be 15 permits out there, we only get requests for three," she said. "We really don't know at this point."

As of Wednesday, city staff have received five applications and additional inquiries, Czerniak told Patch. Two permits have already been issued — to Rosati's Pizzeria and Forest Orthodontics & Pediatric Dentistry — while three others require additional information to be submitted, she said.

Municipal food truck regulations in Illinois have not been without controversy in recent years.

In 2012, the owners of a donut and coffee truck sued the city of Evanston over a clause in its food truck regulations that prohibited those based outside of Evanston from operating in the city. After the city's law department spent four years fighting the case in Cook County court, its aldermen removed the requirement that food trucks have a physical location in Evanston "to dispose of costly litigation."

In 2019, the Illinois Supreme Court upheld a food truck ordinance in Chicago that requires trucks to remain more than 200-feet from stationary restaurants and submit to GPS tracking following a challenge from food truck operators.

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case on privacy grounds later that year.