A small convoy of food wagons will pull into Railroad Park today at the first Trucks By the Tracks festival, billed as a celebration of Birmingham's growing food truck scene.

On Tuesday, though, the Birmingham City Council is scheduled to consider an ordinance that would limit where those food trucks could park and the hours in which they could operate, as well as create an annual fee that some truck vendors say might cause them to move outside the city limits.

"If this goes through, there is no way I'm going with this," Mac Russell, co-owner of the Shindigs Catering truck, said last week. "I will go a different direction in business other than try to keep up with all the stuff they are trying to get us to do."

The food truck movement that has spread throughout the country in recent years is still relatively new to Birmingham, which, like a lot of cities, is grappling with ways to encourage that grass-roots spirit while also being fair to traditional businesses.

"We want downtown employees and other residents to love being downtown, and the food trucks have become a part of that for people," David Fleming, president of Operation New Birmingham said. "So we are trying to find a way to enable that kind of entrepreneurship but also not disadvantage anybody."

On any given weekday, as many as a half-dozen mobile restaurants are scattered around Birmingham and its surrounding suburbs, offering on-the-go diners everything from blackened chicken Vietnamese tacos from the Fresh Off the Bun truck to banana pudding cupcakes from the Dreamcakes van.

FOOD TRUCK RULES IN WORKS

The new ordinance would:

> Restrict food trucks and pushcarts from doing business within one block of any existing restaurant.

> Limit hours of operation for trucks and carts to between 11:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. Mondays through Fridays within the City Center.

> Require truck and cart operators to pay a $500 annual permit fee, plus $25 for each food service worker and an extra $300 to operate within the City Center.

> Establish a Mobile Food Vendors Committee to create designated food zones where trucks and carts could operate.

"It's become a cool, trendy thing," ONB's Fleming said. "You feel like you're in a really vibrant downtown when you see food trucks. It's kind of a sign that you are in a vibrant place."

Those truck vendors had pretty much operated under the radar until earlier this year, when owners of downtown restaurants began to complain that the trucks were taking away some of their customers and parking spaces, and doing so without having to worry about the high costs of running a restaurant.

After hearing those complaints, the Birmingham City Council's Public Safety Committee put together a proposed ordinance to regulate the food trucks. In July, the committee held a public hearing to get feedback on that plan from both the truck vendors and the restaurant owners.

The committee is expected to present a revised proposal to the full council at its Tuesday meeting. The proposal applies not only to food truck vendors but also pushcart operators.

"This ordinance is not set in stone," councilman Johnathan Austin, chairman of the Public Safety Committee, said. "As you noticed, it's marked 'draft,' and it will not be a complete legal binding document until the council casts its final vote.

"We may delay it after looking at it (Tuesday), but we are certainly going to have an ordinance that the city and the businesses -- the brick-and-mortar businesses, as well as the food truck vendors -- will be happy with. We tried our best to strike that balance between everyone."

Food truck vendors, though, are concerned about several items in the proposed ordinance, including restrictions prohibiting the trucks from parking within a block of an existing restaurant and limiting their hours of operation to two hours a day Mondays through Fridays.

Vendor fee

Another concern is an annual mobile vendor fee that starts at $500 and, depending on where the trucks park and how many employees they have, could add up to nearly $1,000 a year.

That is on top of what the food truck operators already have to pay for health department permits and business licenses.

"It's pretty dadgum egregious," said Jason Parkman, owner of the Spoonfed Grill food truck. "We pay a lot of money as it is already. We don't make a lot of money."

Brad Johnson, who owns the Chick-fil-A on Fifth Avenue North, was one of the downtown restaurant owners who voiced concerns about the food trucks at that public hearing in July.

On most weekdays, either the Spoonfed Grill or the Shindigs truck is parked in the same block of Johnson's business and across the street from the food court inside the Regions Harbert Plaza.

Johnson supports the restriction that would prohibit the trucks from parking too close to existing restaurants -- whether it is an actual city block or a designated number of feet.

"The argument that the food trucks are going to have is, if my food is good enough, then (customers) will walk right past the food trucks to get here," Johnson said. "Well, conversely, I could say if their food is good enough and they have to move a block down the street, people will keep walking a block to get their food. So that argument goes both ways."

The proposed ordinance also would establish a Mobile Food Vendors Committee, a new panel that would determine the designated zones where the food trucks and pushcarts could operate.

The draft does not address where those zones might be, though, and vendors fear they may get shoved so far off the beaten path that it could kill their businesses.

"They talk about zoning areas, but they have not given us any representation (as to) where these zones, these food truck zones, will be," Parkman said. "So you gotta wonder what that's going to be about."

ONB, the public-private partnership that promotes downtown development, has looked at what other cities around the country have done to regulate food trucks in hopes of determining what might work best in Birmingham.

Some of those cities, such as Portland, Ore., and Austin, Texas, have designated pods, which function like mobile food courts that allow trucks to park in clusters. Those pods have become dining destinations in and of themselves.

That might work in Birmingham, ONB's Fleming said, but the trick is finding the right location. Many of the empty lots in the immediate downtown area are already reserved for parking.

"We have not been able to find that perfect spot that I think would be a great option to see something like that emerge," Fleming said. Avondale, which has undergone an urban resurgence in the past year or so, might be a possibility, he said.

Coexistence

John T. Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance and author of the "Truck Food Cookbook," said tensions between food truck vendors and restaurant owners are common in cities where, like Birmingham, the mobile food scene is fairly new.

"This is a point of discussion across the country, and once this discussion begins, usually in about a year, the advocates for street food and the advocates for brick-and-mortar businesses, along with city government, usually reach detente," Edge said.

Link Loegler, a lawyer who works in the Wells Fargo Tower downtown, eats out for lunch almost every weekday, and he spends his money at both restaurants and food trucks.

The two are totally different businesses, Loegler said, and they are not competing for the same customers. When he's dining on a budget, Loegler goes to Subway or Chick-fil-A. When he wants to splurge a little, he goes to Shindigs or Spoonfed Grill.

"This is 10 bucks," he said, referring to a blackened fish sandwich he ordered from the Spoonfed Grill truck. "I could eat at Subway for $5 or less, and Chick-fil-A, the same thing. If you are price-conscious, this is not what you are going to do."

Many food truck vendors, Edge said, are really aspiring restaurateurs trying to make enough money to one day open their own brick-and-mortar businesses. About 20 percent of the mobile food vendors he writes about in his book had already opened restaurants by the time the book came out this spring, he added.

"These truck food vendors are small business people who have codified a particular food or two or three. They've developed their recipes. They've developed their business plan. And now, like a brick-and-mortar business, they are, within the limits that they have to work, trying to make a go of it."

Johnson, the Chick-fil-A owner, said the food trucks and the restaurants can "co-exist peacefully," and praised his mobile counterparts for adding to the downtown dining mix.

"They do get people out of the buildings," Johnson said. "I think they serve a purpose and fill a need for us."

For hungry office workers such as Loegler, though, the food trucks aren't just a luxury, but more like a necessity.

"I would hate to lose the trucks because they do add some variety, and I like the variety," Loegler said. "If you work down here and you don't bring your lunch, you would go crazy eating at the same seven or eight or 10 places."

To view the proposed food truck ordinance, follow this link.

Join the conversation by clicking to comment or email Carlton at bcarlton@bhamnews.com.