Santa Barbara County Cracking Down on Street Food Vendors

Supervisors Launch Task Force to Get Grip on Unlawful Roadside and Sidewalk Pop-Ups

The county supervisors on Tuesday were shown how unpermitted food vendors stored meat in an unsafe manner. | Credit: County of Santa Barbara

The county supervisors heard gruesome accounts of bloody buckets of warm meat — with no shortage of color photos provided — being van-pooled up from Los Angeles by persons unknown (and, to date, unknowable) to be cooked and sold in the growing number of unpermitted and un-permittable temporary roadside Mexican restaurants now spouting up all over Santa Barbara County. They also heard the people actually serving this food were most likely victims of L.A.-based labor trafficking rings, part of a growing industry almost as exploitative as slavery.

Among the public safety concerns posed by the sidewalk and roadside food vendors are fire risks posed by open-flame stoves and roadside and traffic safety. | Credit: Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office

Leading the charge for a task for a multi-jurisdictional task force to get a grip on an increasingly ubiquitous issue was Supervisor Joan Hartmann and her administrative assistant Gina Fischer. Although there was some grumbling from Hartmann’s peers that more meetings never solved anything — only enforcement did — and concern expressed about the possibility of runaway costs, the supervisors voted 4-0 to launch the new task force. They put a six-month lid on its length of operation. Supervisor Roy Lee did not the participate because of a conflict of interest; he owns and runs a restaurant in Carpinteria.

Typically, these pop-up operations are more common in cities like Santa Barbara and Santa Maria, but Hartmann, who lives in Buellton, and Fischer jumped in when these operations — powered by open-flame stoves fueled by large propane tanks — started sprouting up along aside Highways 154 and 246, both increasingly infamous because of growing numbers of traffic accidents, fatal and otherwise.

The problem, according to Hartmann and Fischer, is that two state laws — passed in 2017 and 2022 — designed to inoculate sidewalk vendors — as low-income and largely Latino participants in what’s known as “the informal economy” — from criminal prosecution. These bills effectively strip the power of local authorities to shut down operations for sanitary violations that would get an ordinary restaurant closed.

The key proviso of these laws that Hartmann and Fischer objected to is the one that allows any vendors stopped by local government agencies — law enforcement, public health, or environmental safety — to refuse to identify themselves. Without that, only limited enforcement actions, they said, are possible. Environmental Health workers, they said, can and do monitor these operations, but they need a law enforcement presence to actually initiate enforcement actions. Environmental Health workers typically do not work evenings, nights, or weekends; because these are the times such stands are most active, that’s another serious regulatory disconnect.

Thus far this year, 137 notices of violation have been issued to stand operators. But warnings, the supervisors were told, have little effect, and citations are meaningless if no one has to sign them.

To date, the most effective enforcement action has been to confiscate the vendors’ meat. That’s happened a handful of times — the largest seizure was 415 pounds in Santa Maria; in another, 11 spits of meat were seized.

But under state law, all confiscated and seized goods have to be returned upon request within 30 days. And in that time, the meat and other perishables have to be kept refrigerated, no matter how warm and unhealthy the Environmental Health safety officers say it is.

The county, it turns out, has a critical shortage of refrigerated storage containers. (To date, the supervisors were told, no one has asked for any of the seized meat to be returned.) Likewise, the supervisors were told, the county lacks adequate storage capacity for the tents, tent poles, generators, outdoor lights, and propane tanks typically needed by any of these operations.

Supervisor Bob Nelson argued that more enforcement was needed, not more meetings; Supervisor Steve Lavagnino agreed it was a problem, but wondered what a task force would solve.

Supervisor Laura Capps worried about runaway costs — Ventura County has already spent $2 million trying to solve the problem — and adding to the growing sense of fear experienced by many in the county’s immigrant communities caused by the aggressive enforcement posture pursued by the Trump White House.

Helping to tip the scale in favor of passage was the enthusiastic support for the task force voiced by District Attorney John Savrnoch, who himself commutes daily from his home in the Santa Ynez Valley to work downtown. He expressed concern that the people behind these pop-ups were engaging in human trafficking. And to date, no one seems to know exactly who these people are.

“To pierce this veil,” Savrnoch stated, “we need to know who. That is the question.”