By Molly Magennis
Hobsons Bay’s controversial Mobile Vendors Policy has finally been settled, with major adjustments made to meet the community and trader feedback the policy received.
The original policy received criticism from many in the community, including local ice cream truck vendor Albert Cerminara, for the 500 metre exclusion zone and $12,000 annual permit fee for roaming vendors.
Back in April last year, Mr. Cerminara said the policy was unreasonable and unfair, and compared it to Maribyrnong’s own vendor policy, which only had an annual fee of $3152.50.
After receiving conflicting community feedback, in September last year the decision was made to defer the draft policy to the council’s first meeting in 2022.
In a council meeting on February 8, a range of significant updates were made to the policy, including a change to the exclusion zone, which will now be 100 metres.
Exclusion zones will also not apply when bricks and mortar businesses are closed, and the annual permit for roaming vendors has now been slashed to $3850.
The majority of the councillors voted in favour of the policy, apart from Mayor Peter Hemphill and Cr Pamela Sutton-Legaud.
“After the considerable amount of work that’s gone on by the staff to get community consultation and also to integrate those changes that we’ve made on several occasions, this seems to be another opportunity to just water down what’s being recommended, and I’d love to understand the logic for it,” Cr Sutton-Legaud said.
For Mr. Cerminara, who runs the Mr Fresh Ice Cream truck, the amendments made to the policy were great news for his business.
“They’ve adopted a neighbouring council’s policy and brought those measures in and for that, I thank them and absolutely, it’s great news,” he said.
“What the council’s fantastically done is adopt Yarra’s policy which absolutely works and has worked for many years, and it’s what the council officers, the administrator, should have done from the start rather than mucking around.”
The policy will be trialled for a year.
