Think Out Loud

Multnomah County aims to address poor conditions in some food cart pods

By Rolando Hernandez (OPB)
July 5, 2022 5:06 p.m. Updated: July 6, 2022 10:50 p.m.

Broadcast: Tuesday, July 5

A sign advertises a Kim Jong Grillin food cart location outside the Cartopia cart pod on the corner of SE Hawthorne 12th in Portland, Ore., on Thursday, May 7, 2020. Owner Han Ly Hwang said closing seemed like the obvious choice in March when the governor's stay-home order went into effect. He's since reopened the cart for contactless orders.

To address concerns of food cart pod conditions, Multnomah County launched a license system in January that requires pods to provide certain amenities to food carts.

Bryan M. Vance / OPB

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Rodents, overflowing trash cans and poor wastewater management are just a few issues facing food cart pods in Multnomah County. Back in January, the county implemented a new set of safety rules and a license system for pods, requiring them to provide certain amenities for their carts. We’ll hear from Jeff Martin, environmental health manager for Multnomah County, on what some food carts were experiencing and how the new system is rolling out.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller:  It has been half a year now since Multnomah County implemented new license requirements and safety rules for food cart pod owners. They were put in to address concerns about unsanitary conditions at some pods. The rules cover both existing and new food cart pods. Jeff Martin is the Environmental Health Manager for Multnomah County and he joins us with the details. Steve, thanks for joining us. What exactly prompted these new rules?

Jeff Martin:  Back in 2017, our Food Service Advisory Committee, which is made up of restaurants, industry groups and mobile unit operators, really identified a couple of things that they were struggling with the mobile units, and collectively at the pods. And so they wrote a letter to the County Commissioners asking them to form a work group to identify some solutions. As Portland is a huge mobile unit town - right now we have almost 1000 mobile units in the County - we wanted to make sure that they were operating as safely as possible. And so they requested that the County would explore what we could do to increase sanitation at these pods?

Miller:  I’m just purely curious. If you yourself go out sometime, do you say to your friends or family, ‘do you want to go to a mobile unit ‘or do you call them food carts just in everyday life?

Martin:   In everyday life, I call them a food cart. But technically they’re mobile units.

Miller:  Okay, I mean I am talking to a health regulator, so that makes sense. But I was just curious. What exactly were the kinds of complaints you were getting from food cart owners about the pods?

Martin:  A lot of them go back to some of the basics - of gray water disposal. They’re sitting out on parking lots where some of them don’t have sanitary sewer connections. So they were reliant on wastewater cubes where they would collect all their waste water. And wastewater spills would happen either from tanks breaking or someone accidentally hitting them. And of course when we go out there to try to address some of these issues at pods, if there are 50-60 mobile units all in one property, trying to identify where that gray water was coming from on a slope after it just rained, is near to impossible.

And so that’s when we really started looking at what the responsibility is with the pod management. And the same thing goes back to solid waste disposal. People would throw their trash onto the ground or they wouldn’t hit all the way into the dumpster and it would start spreading around. So we really need to make sure that there was someone there responsible to clean up solid waste if it was improperly disposed of.

Miller:  But before these new rules, and we’ll get to what they cover, what was required, if anything of the property owners or the people who were leasing these spaces to the food cart owners?

Martin:  There were no responsibilities for the pod manager if they were operating one. We had some wonderful examples of pod managers that were doing things right and that’s what we kind of were looking at. But most often if you were allowed, through zoning, to have mobile units on the property, pod management did not require any responsibility. So you could see pods with no electricity, no drinking water, no wastewater services on site, to some that you would see that had every service possible to those mobile unit operators.

Miller:  Was there a lack of understanding on the part of some food cart operators about what their landlords were expected to provide or had to provide? What you’re saying is they didn’t have to provide anything. They gave some number of square feet and the cart could be there. And that’s all they legally had to do. Was there some confusion on the part of cart owners about what they should have access to?

Martin:  We saw that a lot, yeah. When the cart owners started operating and they would quickly use all their waste water capacity or they would run out of drinking water, they would go around looking for how to get more. And most often, they would have to close and that would really restrict their business because they would only be able to operate half a day. That’s when the cart owners really started going over their contracts when they were signing leases with pod managers, to ensure those basic necessities are available to them while they’re trying to be successful.

Miller:  But that was a contractual reality as opposed to a legal one at the city or county level, in terms of what had to be provided. Meanwhile, can you give us a sense for the health or sanitation requirements that the cart owners themselves had to abide by this whole time?

Martin:  They actually have some of the same standards as restaurants throughout the state,.that’s a statewide code. And so a lot of people will look at a cart and think, ‘oh, they don’t have to follow the same rules and regulations’, when in fact they do. And so when you see a cart operating, they’re doing the same things as a restaurant would have to do. And the added requirement on those cart owners was ensuring the utilities of the cart are actually working at the same time. Most often when you’re in a restaurant, you can turn on the fixture and you’re going to get water coming out of the faucet. In a mobile unit, cart operators are also responsible for making sure their plumbing is going to be working and they also have enough potable water to actually work through the day.

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Miller:  So let’s turn to, what has now been, the regulation of the County as of January 1, 2022. What do food cart pod managers now have to provide?

Martin:  They have a couple of things that we’ll be looking at when we do inspections at pods and really focusing on some of the leading concerns that the work groups came up with. And so they asked us to focus on ensuring that all cart owners have: potable water to their site, whether it’s either from a spigot or through a hauling service; making sure that wastewater spills will happen and knowing that they know how to clean them up and prevent them from getting into the storm sewer; making sure carts have a separation between them, so we can prevent it from spreading from cart to cart to cart; ensuring solid waste is picked up and is disposed of on a routine basis, throughout the pod, which is the front of the house and the back of the house; as well as making sure that there’s utilities that are adequate and sufficient, o we don’t have carts having to turn off power to some appliances so they could actually just keep cooking during their busy time; and then finally making sure they have a plan to address vectors that may start coming towards pods, because pods and mobile units don’t cause the vectors to happen, but they are a source of food for vectors to come.

Miller:  When you say vectors can I just imagine a rat?

Martin:  You can.  There could be rats, pigeons, flies. We address a lot of those things through our integrated pest management.

Miller:  From what you’ve heard from food cart owners, have the new requirements for pod operators increased the average rent that pod operators charge?

Martin:  We haven’t heard that yet. Again, most of our requirements are plans, making sure they know what to do or making sure services are actually being provided adequately and sufficiently. So we really didn’t try to address having additional costs, knowing that a lot of these things can be taken care of with, you know, thinking it out and having a plan and knowing how to address it when it happens.

Miller:  Existing pod owners, they are supposed to apply for a new license, a license that didn’t exist before. Even if they’ve been in operation for years now. Who is checking to make sure that they’re actually doing that?

Martin:  There’s quite a few of us right now.  We’re sending out letters actually. I’ll be doing a site visit to a pod this afternoon to make sure that they know what they’re supposed to be doing. And it also addressed some of the outstanding complaints that we have at the site. But we have a team of people that are going around that pod owners are not responding to communication being mailed to them to ensure they know what’s needed.

Miller:  Without naming names, can you give us a sense for what happens at a visit, like the one you’re doing today and the steps, in terms of cracking down, that can follow in the worst case circumstances?

Martin:  Certainly. So we’ll make sure we have all the proper contact information because that’s one of the first steps of making sure that we’ve been getting the letters to the property owner. After that we will ask them to find out what their game plan is and the time frame about getting it accomplished. And if it can be done in a quick and timely fashion, we will set that up with them. And if that’s not we will, unfortunately, go towards enforcement, knowing that they are required to be following the rules, as many of the other pods are already doing.

Miller:  And what does enforcement mean?

Martin:  It can be fines.

Miller:  What have you heard from cart owners since the new rules have gone into effect? As you mentioned from the beginning, the genesis of all of this was among other things, complaints from cart owners. Have those decreased in the last six months?

Martin:  Just because the program is just getting started, we haven’t gotten a lot of the complaints going down. We have a lot of encouragement from the mobile unit operators knowing that these things are coming in place and it’s only gonna support them by having a clean and sanitary pod that will attract more business. So we have not seen any of those complaints go down yet, but we have seen some support.

Miller:  Finally, what should customers do if they find, you know, gross unsanitary stuff at a pod? I mean dirty porta potties or rats running over overflowing trash? Who are we supposed to call?

Martin:  You can contact us at Environmental Health at the Health Department. We have a complaint line where you can call or you can email those complaints Multnomah County Environmental Health . We will assign it to the area inspector and we will get out there to address it.

Miller:  Jeff Martin is the Environmental Health Manager from Multnomah County. He joined us to talk about the County’s six month old rules for food cart pods.

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