☆ Perspectives: how to strengthen SCC’s mom-and-pop food businesses
Small restaurants/food trucks are disproportionately impacted by hidden gov’t fees, fines, and taxes (maybe that’s why so many are closing up shop and heading elsewhere). So Opp Now contributors Gus Mattammal and Susan Shelley have two main suggestions for local gov’t: “aggressively” permit new vendors, and break up big food monopolies. An exclusive.
Gus Mattammal, Midcoast Community councilmember, entrepreneur: Although the biggest drivers of unaffordability (housing, energy) are not really solvable at the local level, one thing that can be done to help is on the food side.
Aggressively permitting food trucks and small grocers to set up throughout a city will make lower-cost food options available. Upper-income people are still going to eat out at restaurants, and pairing the food truck/grocery policy with a celebration of a city's restaurants can help keep everyone's interests aligned so the policy goes through.
Since so much of the bureaucratic headache of opening small businesses is, in fact, local, this is the highest-leverage thing a city or county could do.
Susan Shelley, Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association communications vice president: In addition to needed statewide reform, I'd look at prioritizing and streamlining the operations of local government to reduce costs as much as possible. Taxpayers are tapped out. California has too many laws and policies that impose compliance requirements without any consideration of the increased cost to ratepayers, taxpayers, and consumers (and they're the same people).
On housing, the legislature should create a Housing Opportunity Area (HOA) in the central part of the state. The HOA will be forbidden from having any residential or commercial zoning, and a new UC campus should be built there. Diverting some of the housing demand out of the Bay Area will help stabilize prices here, and housing in the HOA will be much more affordable.
On energy, the state should aggressively pursue a multipronged energy strategy: more solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear, and natural gas. More supply will lower prices.
On food, the state should pursue as aggressive an antitrust strategy as possible in the food production system. There are far too many chokepoints in the food system that are controlled by just a couple companies. Breaking up those companies would prevent them from increasing prices every chance they get.
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