Steve and Jody Newman were ready to invest about $22,000 into a shady Southtown lot this summer, providing the utility hookups to support a park for the fertile culinary phenomenon of gourmet food trucks.

Spurred by Mayor Julián Castro’s desire to transform the downtown area into a vibrant attraction, city officials encouraged the project. Then everyone — the Newmans, the mobile chefs, even the city officials — ran into an insurmountable problem: the city itself.

In San Antonio, strict mobile food vending laws make it difficult for food trucks to flourish. Acknowledging the need for change, officials are jump-starting a process to get more moveable feasts on the road.

City Manager Sheryl Sculley has ordered a review of existing ordinances and wants staff to develop recommendations for the City Council, a plan Castro embraces.

“San Antonio’s probably been a bit too traditional with respect to food vendors, and other cities have been more creative,” Castro said. “But that will certainly change. The city will review the policy on food vendors. They’ve played a role in a number of cities in enlivening downtown, and they can play that role for San Antonio.”

At the leased Southtown lot, the Newmans’ park would have featured about five trucks hawking the likes of $8 Japanese beef sliders and $5 french fries rendered in duck fat.

But the plan was snagged by a city law that prohibits food trucks parked on commercial property from vending within 300 feet of a restaurant without written, notarized permission from the restaurant. And the owner of any restaurant within that range can change his or her mind at any time.

Jody Newman says she asked city officials whether they would protect her investment.

“The city did a lot of research to tell me, ‘No,’” she said. “My beef is that, ‘So you want these new, progressive developments, but you’re not willing to protect the infrastructure it takes to do it right.’”

Other local laws have stymied progress.

Inspired by a fear of ice cream vendors, one law requires mobile food vendors to undergo an FBI background check that can take six weeks to complete. Another prohibits vendors from setting out tables or chairs and playing music.

Chef and restaurateur Jason Dady is particularly annoyed by an ordinance that bans mobile food trucks from the downtown business district. Owner of several popular restaurants that include Tre Trattoria Downtown, Dady also runs the DUK Truck.

“It’s just absolutely ridiculous. It’s absurd. It makes no sense,” Dady said. “The one place we do have the population for foot traffic is the one place they won’t allow us to have food trucks.”

As for why, Dady has a suspicion: other restaurants.

“They don’t want someone buying a $3 taco,” he said. “They want someone buying a $9 plate of enchiladas. There’s no doubt the entrenched business owners on the River Walk do not want to see it.”

Aware of the city’s shifting stance, officials with the San Antonio Restaurant Association are striking a cautious tone.

“It’s a sensitive issue,” said Yolanda Arellano, executive director of the association. “We don’t want to deny someone from being an entrepreneur. And restaurateurs are the epitome of the American dream. But at the same time you’ve got to be fair. There’s an investment in that mortar, in that brick. And you want it to be safe, too.”

As change stirs, opponents will have to contend with a city looking to the future.

“I hear that there are concerns from existing restaurants,” Sculley said. “But a rising tide lifts all ships.”

Austin trucks

In Austin, the tide of gourmet food trucks has risen high. But city officials have managed to calm politically choppy waters.

On a bright, gusty day last week, dozens of customers braced themselves against the wind to enjoy lunch at a cluster of gourmet food trucks downtown.

One of them, Turf N Surf Po’ Boy, was dishing out blackened swordfish tacos from a weathered shipping container decked with flourishes — a painted peace sign, a surfboard, a longhorn skull — about as funky as the music playing from its loudspeaker.

Across Congress Avenue loomed The Austonian, a glittering high-rise with two upscale restaurants on the first of its 56 stories.

“I believe life should be full of choices,” said Ralph Gilmore, owner of the taco and sandwich truck. “I’ve done five different businesses. This has probably been the easiest.”

Since 2006, the number of food trucks in Austin and its surrounding county has swelled from 648 to more than 1,200.

The saturation sparked complaints in 2009 by a mobile snack vendor that led to tighter mobile vending codes, said Sue Simons, a supervisor with Austin’s Environmental and Consumer Health Unit.

“We started out with small meetings, and by the end, I had council chambers full with overflow in the lobby,” she said. “It was a lengthy process. It took time. But all-in-all, it was successful.”

By many accounts, Austin achieved a balance that allows mobile food vendors to thrive while ensuring health and safety.

Five items are required to operate. They include a sales tax permit; an itinerary of where the sales will occur; a restroom agreement to ensure a nearby lavatory; a certification of a commissary; and an inspection by the Austin Fire Department for trucks using propane.

There are no limits to where food trucks may operate, provided they remain on commercial property. No background checks are required, and restaurants are granted no protected areas.

As general counsel of the Texas Restaurant Association, Glen Garey works in downtown Austin. He says the environment has inspired little hostility among food trucks and restaurants.

“There was a great deal of tension when the concept first started to balloon,” Garey said. “I think a lot of that kind of dissipated.”

He added that Houston has seen a different outcome.

An influx of food trucks there led to a health-code crackdown that severely restricts their operations. Trucks with propane can’t go downtown, and no food trucks can park on a street for more than an hour or sell food within 100 feet of any outdoor seating, said Laura Spanjian, the city of Houston’s sustainability director.

She said Houston also is planning to lift restrictions to allow food trucks downtown.

Urban core

With nearly 300 kitchens on wheels, about 40 of them selling gourmet food, San Antonio has a fraction of the food trucks of Austin.

Yet creative mobile chefs abound, and the roadblocks, they say, can discourage.

Brandon McKelvey, who sells gourmet comfort food with Jason Paschall out of their truck, Say.She.Ate, deplores the background check law.

“Every time I hire someone new, I have to go through that, and it’s totally impractical,” he said. “It takes six weeks.”

Former City Councilman Richard Perez authored the ordinance in 2006 after a constituent complained in an email that her neighborhood ice cream man was “hitting on” her teenage daughter. At the time, Perez acknowledged there was no evidence that local mobile food vendors were sex offenders.

Laid off from a bank, Sameer Siddiqui invested $40,000 into a culinary truck and now sells flavorful Pakistani street food from the Rickshaw Stop with his wife, Meagan. But they were exiled from the parking lot of the Cantina this summer, he said, after its owner cited the 300-foot rule.

“The (parking lot) owner deferred to the bar owner, and the bar owner said, ‘No,’” Siddiqui said.

Some local businesses allow food trucks to park on their properties, but another local law requires the trucks to move daily.

Many take refuge at Boardwalk on Bulverde at 14732 Bulverde Road, where owner Cameron Davies has built the city’s first mobile food park.

City officials now say they want the food trucks downtown, an aim that reflects Castro’s communitywide improvement plan, SA2020. The first phase of the plan states “better downtown business and job opportunities will be created only if the city’s urban core becomes a primary gathering point for its residents.”

Deputy City Manager Pat DiGiovanni said Project for Public Spaces, a “placemaking” consultant hired by the city, broached food trucks at a four-day academy for city staff this summer.

“The key is we want to introduce this into our downtown and surrounding neighborhoods because we think it really has a great deal of value to the downtown experience,” DiGiovanni said.

“We’re excited about it. We’re on top of it.”

As for Jody Newman, she’s planning to move forward with a scaled-back version of the Southtown park stalled by the city ordinance. Southchow Mobile Eats will open next weekend at 1022 South St. Mary’s St.

And Newman sees even more good food ahead.

“San Antonio has a unique opportunity to go from superregulated, loosen it in stages and have an environment that everybody can agree on,” she said. “We’ve got our plan. We’ve got it tucked away, and if the ordinances change, we’ll do it.”