York Town News
Town decides to keep ban on ice cream trucks, door-to-door vendors
By Larry Favinger
YORK - Ice cream trucks will not be returning to town.At its meeting Monday night, Aug. 14, the Board of Selectmen opted to leave the 1982 ordinance banning them stand as is, citing safety and the potential long-range impact as major reasons.
The ordinance covers all door-to-door vending in the town, not just ice cream trucks.
"It's trolling for kids," Selectman Torbert Macdonald Jr. said at the board's meeting at the York Public Library in support of the status quo, "as endearing as the presentation was by the little kids the other night."
Macdonald referenced the selectmen's July 24 meeting, where Coastal Ridge Elementary School student Erin Gorham presented a petition with approximately 200 signatures calling for the return of mobile ice cream sales to the town.
Erin's petition said the ordinance was unfair to local children.
"Many of our parents tell us stories about when they were young and bought drumsticks and ice cream sandwiches off the 'Good Humor' ice cream truck," the petition read. "They tell us how they waited to hear the jingle of the truck go through the neighborhood."
Acknowledging the popularity of such scenes in memory, public safety personnel have had a different perspective.
York Police Chief Doug Bracy said changing the ordinance would open the town to vendors of all kinds, not just ice cream.
He said there is "no quality control of the people. … We don't know who they are. … That was a huge concern of mine."
Bracy said changing the ordinance would open Pandora's Box of vendors and added that most of people in town don't want to see that happen.
Selectmen received a letter from Paula Balcom, a teacher in Windham, urging them to "keep your ban on ice cream trucks" and listing the problems these vendors create in her town.
She wrote of the intrusive music from the trucks as well as "unsupervised encounters with children, nutrition problems from junk foods and rude, inconsiderate truck drivers."
Balcom said she wished Windham had an ordinance similar to York's.
Macdonald said he "agreed with pretty much everything she said" in the letter, noting the trucks would be an "unseemly intrusion of the quiet life people come here to get."
The petitioners had hoped for a different outcome.
"We, the children and the parents of York, sign the following petition asking the town of York to change their laws concerning this situation," they wrote in the petition, which was referred to the York Police Department for study following the July 24 meeting.
Had the selectmen decided to make a change in the ordinance, it would have had to be approved by the town's voters at either a May or November election.
