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Background:

The ordinance drafted by city council states the following: “With an ever-growing number of Street and Sidewalk Vendors operating within the City since the new laws ... City Council finds it necessary to incorporate rules and regulations to ensure vendors are providing their services in a safe and sanitary manner, safeguard the health and safety of the general public being served by vendors, and create standards to protect public resources.” 

Their proposed solution is simply more policing and more regulations of street and sidewalk vendors that imposes burdensome restrictions that disproportionately affect low-income, working-class, immigrant, and non-English speaking communities.

Impacts on our street and sidewalk vendors, and our communities: 

• De Facto Ban on Food Vending :
  • The prohibition on all generators, open flames, and heating elements, without a defined alternative path for cooking, effectively bans hot food vending
• Bans Essential Equipment :
  • canopies and tents – even in Stockton's notoriously hot summers
• Mandatory Background Checks Without Justification :
  • Requiring Live Scan fingerprinting for all vendors introduces a potentially discriminatory barrier, especially without evidence that this improves safety
  • SB 946 requires that regulations be directly tied to health or safety—not criminal history alone
• Lack of Clear Pathways for Low-Income Vendors 
  • Park fee and licensing costs are not paired with a sliding scale, waiver, or education campaign
  • This risks excluding the very communities the law was designed to support
• Bans Vending Within 50-300 feet of :
  • Designated transportation center 
  • Entry or exit from a parking lot, parking garage, strip mall, or shopping center
  • Intersections, alleys, and parking lots
  • Entrance of schools (prior to 4:00pm), libraries, youth/senior centers
• Sets No-Vendor zones on :
  • City-owned parks, venues, and facilities unless there is an existent signed agreement for concessions
  • Tree wells, planting strips, and residential zones
  • Pathway, sidewalk, or other area beyond entrance of a park or venue owned or operated by the city of Stockton
  • Parking stalls or designated parking areas

OUR DEMANDS:

We urge Stockton City Council to VOTE NO on the proposed street vendor ordinance. Here's why :

• This will disproportionately impact our immigrant and refugee communities in Stockton. These street and sidewalk vendors create, preserve, and share so much cultural wealth and identity that has been embraced not just by communities in Stockton but outside of the city as well.
• This is unfair because these ordinances have exclusively been issued in English. The majority of our street vendors’ first language is not English. This not only leaves them out of a conversation ABOUT them, but purposefully excludes them.
• The framing of this conversation, of ‘clean’ vs ‘unclean’, may be traced back to narratives of dirtiness that have been inflicted on people of color and immigrants for centuries.
• If this conversation was really about public health, safety, and entrepreneurship, then we demand that the city first and foremost create a safe working environment for our street and sidewalk vendors through culturally relevant resources and services, especially including language translation. The default solution should be FOR the community, NOT to automatically police the community. 

Help us stop City Council from criminalizing our street vendors—and instead create effective, inclusive solutions!

• Click here to learn more about what is going on, how to get involved, and ways to help