Brookhaven’s festivals bring hundreds of vendors to its downtown streets. But there have been concerns about where those vendors set up and if they have permission to set up.

City officials are working on a revised ordinance that will address those concerns.  City attorney Joe Fernald discussed his concerns about the city’s transit vendor ordinance with the Board of Aldermen at a recent meeting.

“It seems like a great deal of people downtown are more interested in ordinances that specifically speak to the downtown area and how things are set up,” Fernald said. “We need to have some type of ordinance, something that goes with the transit vendors ordinance, that tells people when you’re going to have a special event, if in fact vendors are going to be there, you need to have spots aligned for them, where they have to have some identification and they have to pay something.”

Fernald said the city has seen an increasing number of problems arise from festivals that do no track its vendors.

“I know at Hog fest last year, people just showed up and started setting booths up,” Fernald said. “There was no registration. They had people blocking traffic and telling us we’d be arrested if we tried to go around their markers.”

“The cleanup from these things is extensive,” Fernald said. “It’s not as bad with the Ole Brook Festival — they clean everything up. But I know on the other one, I was picking up potato chip bags, coke cans and food just thrown on the ground in my parking lot. I won’t even get into the people that were plugging into the wall using my electricity. Everybody accepts Ole Brook Festival for what it is and the other festivals are big opportunities too, but we need to be able to police them.”

Ward 5 Aldermen Fletcher Grice agreed with Fernald’s points, citing an incident involving vendors.

“They had somebody set up in a parking lot,” Grice said. “The guy that manages the parking lot asked the vendor to leave. Well the vendor says he got permission. The manager said, ‘No you don’t. My boss lives off and asked me to ask you to leave.’ Chief and them have no way of knowing who is telling the truth. If a vendor sets up somewhere there needs to be something we can put in there that says who ever owns the land has to give permission to set up a booth. The vendors need to have something written and displayed.”

Fernald said he would be adding a section to the transit vendor ordinance that outlines where a vendor can be set up during a festival and how the vendor or festival can obtain the documents stating the vendor has permission to be there.

A copy of the revised ordinance will be sent to each alderman, Fernald said. A work session will then be scheduled, followed by a public hearing to adopt the changes.

 

Old train depot

Engineer Ryan Holmes recently informed the board that Dungan Engineering would be accepting bids for the old train depot roof project now until June 21 at 10 a.m.

“We’ve been hard at work on that in the last several days,” Holmes said. “We have set a bid opening of June 21, which is the third Tuesday in June. It’s also a board day. Our goal is to open bids that morning at 10 a.m. That will give us a couple of hours to review them, make sure everything is in order and come that night with a recommendation.”

Specifications for the project will be listed in the public notices section in the newpaper, Holmes said.

 

In other board business: 

• The board approved Gulf State Fence of Summit as the contractor to rebuild three sides of the Rose Hill Cemetery fence.

• The board approved Public Works Director Keith Lewis’s request to redo the sewer lines on the property located on the corner of Brookway Boulevard and Hwy. 51, where the new Jeff Wilson car dealership will be located.