Ann Arbor considers dropping food truck parking requirement

Ann Arbor could scrap a parking requirement for food trucks that dates to 2019.

City staff want to remove a rule linking the number of food trucks allowed on a property to its parking capacity. The City Planning Commission discussed the proposed change at a workshop Tuesday, Oct. 27, according to WEMU.

Ann Arbor repealed minimum parking requirements for land uses effective Sept. 4, 2022. The food truck restriction remained. The parking-to-truck ratio was written into the use standards in the Unified Development Code rather than in the city’s parking standards, so it survived the broader repeal, according to a staff memorandum from City Zoning Coordinator Erik Perdonik.

That left food trucks as the only land use in Ann Arbor still subject to a minimum parking requirement, according to the memo.

Since the food truck ordinance took effect June 16, 2019, the city has received 34 permit applications, according to the memo. The current code requires operators to obtain a permit annually. In that same span, the city issued two violations: one for operating without a permit, and one for operating without a permit and within 10 feet of a public right-of-way.

Staff reviewed rules in 10 peer cities. None tie the number of food trucks allowed on a site to parking spaces, the memo states. The list includes East Lansing, Traverse City, Marquette, Austin, Madison, Boulder, Columbus, Bloomington, Asheville and Flagstaff. The comparison table lists numerical limits for Boulder and Bloomington: Boulder allows up to four, and Bloomington allows up to three.

Perdonik told WEMU that “none of the cities of our peer communities were tying the number of food trucks on a site to the number of parking spaces.”

The proposed amendment would strike the parking-linked language in Section 5.16.3.G.6 of the UDC. That section currently caps a property with 20 or fewer parking spaces at one food truck. For larger properties, it uses a formula of one vendor per 20 parking spaces, “or fraction thereof.”

The memo posed one open question to commissioners: whether some standard other than parking spaces should limit how many food trucks can operate on a single property. The memo does not identify a vote date.