Steve Brauntuch: Administration fails with food trucks

Ah, the Penn administration. Always working hard to make sure that the concerns of University community members are met with measured, indecisive replies.

All right, that's not a fair statement. Penn officials do listen to valid complaints voiced by students, faculty and staff, and they do make an effort to respond in a positive manner. When it's convenient and when it fits the University's current plans.

But too often, valid community concerns are met with "research" rather than action. It's usually simple things that would take one or two phone calls to fix -- starting high rise construction after 9 a.m. or letting students use Dining Dollars at local restaurants, for instance. When these issues are raised, administrators dodge them in creative ways, handing them off to University Council committees and "task forces" that apparently meet secretly and discuss the issue at hand. In the end, months of delays cause the issue to die down, and little is done to resolve the problem.

The latest example of this "research" process is the plight of campus food trucks. Since 1998, the University has had a firm contract with most campus food truck owners (some fall under city jurisdiction). That contract has been something of a living document, and it was altered and bent numerous times to accommodate needs on both sides. The food trucks existed on campus long before the contract, and because of this, the terms were not taken very seriously.

After the contract ended in July, the University decided it was time to gain the upper hand in food truck bargaining. They entered into a 12-month agreement with food truck owners rather than give them multiyear deals, and they included a new clause forcing food trucks to close at 6 p.m. each night. Because of the historical precedent, food truck owners didn't take it all that seriously and remained open during dinnertime. After all, they make a fairly significant amount of money during the evening hours because Penn community members seek dinner on the go regularly.

But sure enough, in October, the University sent letters to food truck owners threatening them with closure if they didn't close their trucks on time. As Facilities Chief Omar Blaik put it, "We are only enforcing in earnest what we signed with the vendors."

Now that seems strange. Why wasn't this an issue before? Food trucks have been around for a long time, and they have never been forced to close early. It seems strange that this decision coincided with ... the decline of campus dining halls! What an odd coincidence!

Facilities officials claimed it was an important decision for the "viability of small businesses on campus," a category into which food trucks apparently do not fall. Let's be honest -- this was a ploy to force students into the dining halls. Penn officials can use code words all they want, but they're not fooling anybody. All of a sudden, they decided that the current setup didn't bring in nearly enough money and pleased far too many people for it to continue.

Fortunately, students spoke up on behalf of the trucks. The Undergraduate Assembly passed a proposal recommending that the University extend food trucks' operating hours. The Graduate and Professional Student Assembly voiced similar concerns. Several students also expressed their opinions at an open University Council meeting last fall.

And this time, the University listened. After first claiming that more "research" was necessary, Penn officials backed off their new enforcement policy and decided to allow food trucks to stay open until 8 p.m. It's still unclear whether it was the student complaints or the "research" that led administrators to change their minds.

But the point is that Penn officials knew this was a backhanded way to force students into dining halls right from the beginning. How can you justify excluding food trucks, supposedly a Penn institution, from the local vendors category that you are so concerned about? Administrators hid behind the contract and hoped no one would notice if the trucks closed a couple of hours earlier. Unfortunately for them, the community was paying attention, and backing off the contract enforcement was the only way to avoid a PR nightmare.

This won't be the last veiled attempt to cram students into 1920 Commons. It's only a matter of time before Penn officials figure out another way to rebuild Dining Services without actually addressing the problem -- nobody wants to eat in the dining halls.

But that's another issue for another time. For now, the bigger problem is that Penn administrators must have known they were blatantly lying about the need to shut down food trucks at 6 p.m. They did it anyway, and they got caught. There's probably a better way to make sound business decisions than sacrificing the wishes of the Penn community. And if there's not, let's hope the University is more careful next time, because Penn students are smart enough to read through the spin.Steve Brauntuch is a senior communications major from Tenafly, N.J., and the outgoing editorial page editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. Statler and Waldorf appears on Wednesdays.

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