Vendors who park in Uptown Athens will have to wait a little bit longer to hear the fate of their parking spaces.
At its Monday night meeting, Athens City Council members again discussed proposed changes on how mobile vendors, like food trucks, can pay and park Uptown.
Councilman Pat McGee, I-At Large, said the city loses money when vendors don’t use their reserved spots and proposed changing the times vendors’ spaces are reserved.
“Over the past six months I’ve noticed there’s a great deal of non-vending going on, and of course some spots are vacant and not able to be used by the public,” McGee said.
Athens vendors currently have spaces reserved from 4 a.m. until 4 p.m. McGee said the reservation should expire at noon so vendors could still claim their spots but people could park there if they weren’t vending.
Councilwoman Sarah Grace, D-At Large, took issue with McGee’s proposed changes to vendor parking, which included reducing the time the spaces were reserved from 4 p.m. to noon.
“I think it would significantly change the value of the permit that they’ve paid for,” Grace said.
Council members recently tabled a discussion about the proposed changes to Athens codes that would have made a variety of changes to vending regulations. The proposed changes had been opposed by several Athens vendors.
Under current law, vendors pay an annual fee of $1,500 for one of 10 reserved spaces on East Union Street near College Green. That fee reserves a spot for vendors from 4 a.m. to 4 p.m.
McGee previously proposed changing the fee to $125 monthly and changing the amount of reservable spaces from 10 to eight.
McGee has long expressed a desire to change the way mobile vendors pay for their parking – council members have been discussing changes since at least January.
Council members also approved a pilot residential curbside compost project, which aims to decrease the amount of trash sent to the landfill by collecting organic waste like food scraps and paper towels from resident’s curbs.
Councilwoman Chris Fahl, D-4th Ward, said it was a step toward becoming more sustainable, but McGee expressed concerns about extra carbon emissions from the trucks picking up the waste.
