Public Safety Committee considers citywide street-vending rules and tougher penalties; PVH (taxis/limos) ordinance review begins

The Public Safety Committee took up two interrelated enforcement topics. Staff reported the NoDa vending pilot will sunset Feb. 16 and proposed expansion of vending regulation throughout the public right-of-way across the city with limited exceptions (municipal-service-district-authorized programs and permitted festival vending). The principal rationale: Charlotte is an outlier in North Carolina for not regulating vending citywide, and staff cited health-and-safety incidents (unlicensed cooking with open-flame grills in the right-of-way) and chronic non-compliance with civil citations.

CMPD officers described enforcement limits: civil citations are often ignored, and CMPD can issue only a limited number of citations that carry limited collection/enforcement consequences. CMPD requested a stronger enforcement option for repeat offenders; staff preliminarily recommended adding a criminal-class (Class 3 misdemeanor) enforcement pathway for chronic illegal vending, to be drafted with the City Attorney's Office.

Separately, the City Attorney's Office reviewed a stakeholder letter with 18 proposed changes to the PVH ordinance. Staff recommended several legal changes they judged supportable (application-process changes; clearer operator definitions; modifying testing panels to five drugs; refining appeal steps; updating vehicle-age limits from 10 to 15 years with maintained safety inspections; and adding discrete rules and stands for black cars/limos at the airport and Uptown). The Attorney's Office advised against adopting an upfront-pricing model for metered vehicles, citing meter-based manifesting, public-safety/consumer-consumer-protection concerns and statutory constraints.