The emergent food truck industry in Utah faced a sticky web of regulations throughout the beehive state — especially the duplicative inspections, fees, and paperwork they had to file in every city of operation. With Utah’s cities all clustered together, operating in a multi-city landscape meant paying a heavy price.
Libertas rallied food trucks together and formulated a legislative plan to fix the problem and streamline the entire process. We issued a public policy brief and held a public rally to draw media attention to the plight of these entrepreneurs. Then we pushed for a new law that created a reciprocity system for truck owners by allowing them to get inspected and licensed in one city—then subsequent cities would simply review their paperwork and provide them a license for that city at a much lower rate.
The law also enacted a variety of other restrictions on cities, such as preventing them from establishing protectionist boundaries around restaurants (denying food trucks the ability to reasonably compete), denying a business license on the basis of the applicant’s criminal history, enacting restrictions on food trucks operating on private property, and more.
This bill passed nearly unanimously. (The one “no” vote was from a senator who received a letter from a mayor in her jurisdiction stating—publicly!—that he wanted to retain the ability to ban food trucks in order to protect his brick-and-mortar restaurant supporters.)
And in subsequent years, building on this framework for food trucks, Libertas Institute persuaded the legislature to open up these protections to all mobile businesses, a variety of which have been operating throughout Utah under onerous laws. Now, thanks to our help, thousands of business owners and their customers can more freely get about their business.
