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Mike Booth and Sarah Payne, with their 8-month-old daughter, Aubrey Payne, order food at Tasty Bunz food truck during Vegas Streats in downtown Las Vegas on Saturday, Oct. 8, 2011.
By Conor Shine (contact) 
Published Wednesday, Feb. 6, 2013 | 1:15 p.m.
Updated Wednesday, Feb. 6, 2013 | 4:46 p.m.
How to regulate food trucks that are popular in downtown Las Vegas has generated hours of discussion among the Las Vegas City Council over the last several months. But on Tuesday, a new program giving the mobile food vendors more room to operate downtown cruised through the council with no discussion.
The issue: A pilot program that would designate three parking spots downtown as “food-truck only.”
The vote: Passed 6-0, with Mayor Carolyn Goodman absent.
What it means: Food trucks will be able to lease one of three reserved parking spaces downtown from the city for $5 per hour.
Operating a food truck legally in the city can be challenging because the trucks only are allowed to park at a meter for 30 minutes at a time, even though setting up the kitchen often takes half an hour.
To complicate the issue further, the city council passed a new ordinance in October prohibiting food trucks from operating within 150 feet of any brick-and-mortar restaurants.
The program approved Tuesday, which was discussed more fully at a Recommending Committee meeting in January, will create food truck-only parking spaces near the Regional Justice Center, the Bonneville Transit Center and Las Vegas City Hall.
Food trucks will be able to sign up for a lottery with the city’s business licensing department to reserve the spots.
“There’s obviously more food trucks than spaces, so they have to have a lottery to determine who gets what space at what time on what day,” city spokesman Jace Radke said. “It will be a rotation. Everybody will get a shot at the spaces.”
Radke said the city would begin planning lottery next week and the program should be running by March.
The pilot program will run for six months, at which time the council can decide to continue, expand or do away with the parking spaces.
There is such a thing "as too much government" and this is a case in point. The restaurants that failed to change with the time want the food trucks to stay at least 150 feet from their businesses. The ordinance was passed in the interest of those few hecklers. Two months later the food trucks are allowed to set up shop in the same fashion, but just go through the red tape of the government.
This isn't a compromise, just the governments way of appeasing everyone while fattening their pockets and ensuring their jobs. The amount they receive per hour is hardly worth the increase in workload now sent to the city's business licensing department.
If a food truck is permanent or even semi-permanent they should be subject to all the same regulations restaurants are subject to. Such as requiring a public restroom, parking lot, landscaping, grease trap etc...It isn't fair. In addition food trucks often leach customers off restaurants and once they've put the restaurant out of business the truck has to move on to another host location.