Everyone loves LA’s food trucks. That is, until they start leaving trash everywhere.

According to the local blog Yo! Venice!, many of the food trucks that are coming to vend outside The Brig and along the Abbot Kinney strip, especially on First Fridays — a monthly event where business along that strip stay open late — are abusing the locals’ hospitality.

Bret, one of the site’s bloggers, writes:

The nouveau food trucks are not community based and use Abbot Kinney events solely to take from the neighborhood rather than help contribute to it. Our local businesses pay high dollar rent and taxes and still manage to help local charities, local schools and promote local artisans and craftspeople. Local businesses hold a vested interest in making Venice a better place for all of us that reside here and those that visit here.

What has happened? Venice embraced the nouveau food truck trend and many of these food trucks have chosen to be bad party guests that literally trash our home every time we allow them to come to our party.

. . .

I’d think that the Abbot Kinney business association should stand together and start charging these trucks VERY high dollar fees for the agreement to allow them to access their bathrooms. (Heck, they are making their trash problem YOURS when you have to clean it up before opening your business the day after.) We accepted them as a community and they chose to soil where we live. Not cool. While I know that some of the trucks do clean after themselves, I also know that as guests they should self police each other and tell the offending trucks to do the right thing, or clean up after the lame truck owners themselves.

I’m not sure that upping the fee is the way to go. My feeling is that most of these truck operators want to do right by the community and will try to do a better job of self-regulating when people bring issues like this to their attention.

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