TikTok shows Fresno County health officials tossing teen vendor’s food. City offers help
Fresno City Councilmembers Miguel Arias and Luis Chavez are stepping in to help a teen street vendor after Fresno County environmental health inspectors confiscated his hot dog cart and tossed his food during an illegal vendor sweep after a concert at the Save Mart Center.
The inspection and canning of the vendor’s products occurred Sept. 16 after the concert featuring Christian Nodal, a popular Latin Grammy-award-winning Mexican singer.
A viral TikTok shows health inspectors throwing 16-year-old Edgar Tol’s food into plastic trash cans as Fresno State police officers assisted with crowd control. People nearby yelled at the inspectors to quit throwing away the food and leave the vendor alone.
“I felt really bad because they took everything,” Tol said in Spanish in an interview with The Bee on Wednesday. “They took everything from my fellow vendors, too.”
In total, Tol — an eleventh grade student at Bakersfield High School originally from Guatemala — said county officials took approximately $800 worth of his merchandise, including his food and hot dog cart.
“I’ve only been in this business for a little bit of time,” he said. “This has never happened to me.”
Arias and Chavez said they’re offering the vendor assistance to file the paperwork for a permit and potentially giving him a small business grant.
The county action comes months after the city of Fresno invested $20,000 for mobile food vendor safety after a popular street vendor was shot and killed in southeast Fresno last year.
Following the murder of Lorenzo Perez, a 45-year-old husband and father of four young children, city leaders led the charge to organize the Fresno Food Vendor Association to create a direct communication channel and trust between city officials and street vendors. Cultiva La Salud, a health equity nonprofit, also is working with street vendors to provide technical support and education.
Fresno County action
For the last six months, Fresno State police worked with vendors during Save Mart Center events to communicate Fresno County health and safety regulations, said Sean McElhinney, general manager for the Save Mart Center. Signs also were posted outside the event venue with information for vendors.
Tol, the street vendor, said he’s sold outside of about 15 different concerts at Save Mart Center in the past few months and has never seen any such signage.
Save Mart Center officials contacted both Fresno State police and Fresno County Health Department with concerns about non-permitted food vendors setting up on the road and near entrances and exits, preventing the safe exit for event goers, McElhinney said.
“These efforts culminated in a code enforcement effort led by Fresno County Environmental Health officials at this past Friday’s concert,” McElhinney told The Bee. “The Save Mart Center is supportive of having third-party vendors onsite, provided they have a current health department permit and follow Save Mart Center event guidelines.”
County officials said they showed up after the Sept. 16 concert at the request of the Save Mart Center.
Many vendors present after the Christian Nodal concert did not have permits. Environmental Health inspectors followed California Health and Safety code by discarding any food that may cause food-borne illness, county health officials said.
In total, 470 hot dogs, condiments and buns were thrown away during the sweep, health officials said. No citations were issued, but inspectors issued violation notices to seven vendors and impounded seven hot dog carts, county health officials reported.
“The Fresno County Public Health Department Environmental Health team is educating the owner about food safety and how to become a legal food vendor,” a spokesperson said about the 16-year-old vendor featured in the TikTok. “We hope that we can get the owner to cooperate and to move toward compliance.”
Fresno State officials said campus police were on scene to assist inspectors.
City and county approaches differ
After working so hard to repair trust between Fresno Police Department, the city and vendors, Chavez and Arias said the county’s actions were counterproductive.
“It’s unfortunate that the county health department targeted this young man,” Chavez said about the teen vendor. “As a city and county, we should be incentivizing young entrepreneurs to start their own business and make a living the right way. At a time when there are young people getting involved with drugs, gangs and illicit activity, this young 16-year-old was only trying to work and help his parents put food on their table.”
Chavez said it would’ve been more appropriate to issue the vendor a warning and help him get the proper permits rather than throwing away his food “and treating him like a criminal.”
Arias said Fresno Police Department’s policy is not to interfere with pandemic business operations.
“It seems to me that the county of Fresno has taken a completely different approach, which I find alarming because they were very clear that they would not enforce any business restrictions during the unprecedented pandemic,” Arias said. “Yet they have allocated a significant amount of resources to enforce business rules for the most vulnerable vendors that we have in the city. To see a 16-year- old, who could easily be doing something not beneficial for society, earning a living, and to see them treating him that way is shameful.”
Miguel Lopez, president of the Fresno Food Vendor Association, reacted to the news in an interview with The Bee on Wednesday.
“Many people are outraged at what happened,” he said in Spanish. “We as an association would like (that the county) gives a warning to people to leave or move,” he said. “It’s not necessary to take our things.”
Still, Lopez said he respects that county workers were doing their jobs, and added that perhaps Tol didn’t know the local rules around food vending since he comes from a different county.
Lopez also welcomed the hot dog vendors to join the association to learn about their unique needs and challenges.
“The more members we have, the more we can work together and ask for more support for the authorities,” he said, including asking Fresno County to be more flexible with them. “They (the county) have strict requirements that we can’t always meet to get permits,” Lopez said.
Genoveva Islas, program director for Cultiva La Salud, a nonprofit that works with mobile food vendors, said she too was angered by the enforcement action.
“I’m outraged that in a community where we pretend to value the entrepreneurial spirit, capitalism, and people getting to work, that we create policies and practices that are hostile to micro food businesses,” Islas said. “It is no wonder that these small business owners feel discriminated against.”
While Islas said she understands the need to protect the public against food contamination, punitive policies aren’t the only tool.
“We need easy on-ramps to food-handling training and supports to ensure licensing and permitting,” Islas said. “We also need to update laws to the modern day, such as SB972, which can still protect the public and allow for micro food business.”
Advocates for SB972 say proposed law would simplify the permitting process for street vendors and update the standards for their carts. It also would make commissaries more accessible.
As for Tol, he said he plans to purchase another cart to return to selling hot dogs, and that he’ll look into the required permits to sell food legally.
He also expressed gratitude to everyone that has provided him with cash support on Venmo and through a GoFundMe fundraiser in response to the incident.
“Thank you to all the people that are helping me,” he said.
Latinos targeted?
Both Arias and Islas noted how race and ethnicity played into the county’s enforcement action.
“In my opinion, it is clear: the county is targeting Latino vendors at Latino venues for this selective enforcement,” he said. “They chose not to enforce business rules during the pandemic nor now in Clovis, Fig Garden, farmers markers and concerts that feature country music artists.”
Earlier this year, county officials also cracked down on vendors outside the Cherry Auction, asking unpermitted vendors to leave to alleviate traffic congestion and other safety concerns.
As to whether Tol felt the county’s health department enforcement was targeting Latino businesses, he said he’s “heard that (the county targets Latino vendors and events), but it’s the first time it’s happened to me.”
Joe Prado, the county’s assistant director for the Public Health Department, said the county responds to complaints when doing enforcement.
“I won’t walk past the issue of race related to this incident,” Islas said. “There is a lot to uncover about the difficulty experienced by people of color and non-English speakers. “
Language barriers are an ongoing challenge for small business owners trying to navigate processes within Fresno County, said Clarissa Vivian Petrucci, a special projects coordinator with the Central Valley Immigrant Integration Collaborative (CVIIC), said in a Sept. 13 interview with The Bee about immigrant entrepreneurs.
Petrucci said CVIIC has direct contact with Spanish-speaking business and economic development contacts within the city of Fresno.
“The challenge is with (Fresno) County because they don’t have people that speak Spanish in the relevant business areas.”
Tol, the street vendor, said during his encounter with health inspectors, the county officials only spoke English. He had to rely on surrounding customers to translate into Spanish what was going on.
Prado from the county health department said with new funding sources, health department officials are evaluating creating bilingual educational trainings for local unpermitted mobile food vendors so they can obtain licenses to operate in Fresno County.
This story was originally published September 22, 2022, 5:30 AM.
