Officials want to restrict vendors

By: CHRIS BAGLEY - Staff Writer | Sunday, April 15, 2007 12:42 AM PDT ∞

MENIFEE ---- The motorboat was sleek, clean and white with purple trim.

It was hitched to the back of a pickup truck, parked about 20 feet away from the eastbound lanes on Newport Road. Javier Gonzalez was driving west in his sedan when he spotted it, a few minutes past noon Saturday. He pulled off to the right, waited two minutes for traffic to thin, and then made a wide U-turn across the empty lanes to pull up next to the truck. While he sized up the potential purchase, a couple on mountain bikes wheeled up alongside.

It's a common scene on Newport Road and several others in Riverside County, where parked cars are frequently on display alongside vendors hawking things such as mattresses, tamales and craftwork.

Two members of Riverside County's governing board have proposed a ban on roadside vending, which they say creates hazards for passing traffic.

The measure, Supervisors Jeff Stone and Marion Ashley, would generally apply to a 40-foot strip on either side of public roads around the county.

"The increase in the number of unregulated roadside vendors has created significant public safety and welfare concerns," according to the proposed ordinance.

Gonzalez was skeptical. Unsafe drivers will find a place to cause a crash, whether pulling away from a roadside vendor or out of a crowded parking lot at a car dealership, he said.

"It's dangerous everywhere," he said. "For the government, the issue is they don't pay for the permit, or the taxes."

Next to the boat, a 1998 Ford Explorer was parked, and advertised as "fully loaded" for $5,000. A few hundred feet farther down were a truck, a car, and another truck. All three had yellow parking tickets slipped under the windshield wipers.

The new ordinance appears to apply to parked vehicles. It would allow code-enforcement officers to confiscate most goods being sold, but not vehicles.

Another half-dozen people shopping at Stater Bros. supermarket at Newport Road and Murrieta Road on Friday also said they didn't see the need for the ordinance.

One woman said she had seen numerous vendors but didn't consider them a danger or nuisance. She had once stopped to look at carved wooden tiki statues for sale, and her son had once bought flowers for her at a nearby stand.

"As long as they're not stealing or causing trouble, I don't see anything wrong with it," Menifee resident David Mitchell said. "It's better than a lot of things people could be doing out there."

Construction along Newport Road will probably make the issue moot, two of the shoppers said Friday. For one thing, they said, traffic will speed up after a stretch west of Murrieta Road is widened to four lanes, making it harder for drivers to pull off onto the shoulder. In the meantime, road construction will deter them, Mitchell said.

As Mitchell sees it, the bigger problem is the two-lane stretch where some two dozen day laborers waited for jobs Friday morning. Several had pickup trucks, and most were standing from 10 to 20 feet from the road.

The proposed ordinance doesn't address day laborers or the sale of other services.

The ordinance would not apply to residential neighborhoods or to the two dozen cities in the county, which can regulate such activity independently. It could go into effect as soon as late May, though the Board of Supervisors wouldn't fund enforcement until July, when the county's fiscal year begins.

The proposal states that roadside vendors "may cause" car accidents, but didn't offer statistics to flesh out the claim. Stone and Ashley aides handling the proposed ordinance couldn't be reached for comment Friday.

The board is scheduled to discuss the proposal at its meeting Tuesday morning at 4080 Lemon St., Riverside.

- Contact staff writer Chris Bagley at (951) 676-4315, Ext. 2615, or cbagley@californian.com.