Berkshire Park residents try to regain food trucks

By Zak Kerr
| 9:21 p.m. July 22, 2015

West Orange Times & Observer
News

HORIZON WEST — Last year, Gail Weafer, a resident of Berkshire Park in Windermere, started an occasional food truck event in her neighborhood that gained success and popularity in its five renditions.

But without zoning laws to allow permits for such commercial vendors in residential communities — even homeowners associations — an anonymous complaint to the Orange County Board of County Commissioners forced county officials to stop the event.

Weafer, a board member of the Berkshire Park Homeowners Association, said the board and community always supported her food truck socials.

She said the county has continued to work on making the aforementioned permits a reality, but Weafer wants to expedite that process.

Thus, Weafer started an online petition to demonstrate residents’ desire for food trucks. She hopes to submit it to District 1 Commissioner S. Scott Boyd and the rest of the Board of County Commissioners, with more than 500 signatures already.

“It has recently come to my attention that Scott Boyd is now working on allowing food trucks to come and legally serve in residential communities,” Weafer said. “I am not sure on the commissioner’s timeline, but I hope my petition shows how much support there is out there. A neighbor informed me that they are working on getting the close-by community of Summerport in Windermere also a permit for this kind of event. So I am truly hopeful this means we can also be considered for this new permit.”

Boyd said the item has been on his radar.

“In regards to the food trucks, I’ve been getting a number of residential communities who wanted to do this,” Boyd said. “We may need to come up with something in a Board of County Commissioners discussion, because we don’t have anything (in the law) that deals with it right now. We’ll look into it.”

Other nearby communities, such as Independence, still have monthly food truck events despite a lack of permits, Weafer said. She also mentioned communities around Hunters Creek and ChampionsGate in the same vein as Independence. Now communities such as those might lose their food truck events, too, she said, based on orders of code enforcement.

The only difference she sees is that nobody complained in those areas, which the officer who issued the desist order told her, she said.

“I only ever had a handful of people express concern, and they were only worried about trash and traffic,” she said. “But it was never a problem, and myself and the truck owners all walked the property after closing to ensure it was spotless.”

Neighbors continue to ask Weafer about getting back their food truck nights, she said, but not inherently for just the food. The majority of signees — hailing from Winter Garden, Windermere, other areas of Florida, other states and even Britain — do not even mention the food. They refer to the connections they made in their community.

“The reason why the residents are so passionate about it is because it brought us all together in our own community,” Weafer said. “We didn’t have anything like this. We all started to get to know one another — it was wonderful. The truck owners were getting to know the homeowners, too, and developing relationships. People bought in our community for the potential of being a close neighborhood with that sense of community. A farmers market even wanted to join one day a month, but we’re told the same sad rule.”

Weafer uses downtown Orlando as an example of a city that recently formed a pilot program for food trucks to operate in the city’s downtown limits. She calls the growing popularity of food trucks a phenomenon and believes socials such as hers should become legal and standardized in Orange County. Her petition calls for all residential communities to be able to allow commercial vendors, if even specifying food trucks on homeowners associations’ property.

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