Photo by Jon Anderson.
Taqueria Juarez at the 2025 Bluff Park Art Show. The food truck was regularly in the 3400 block of Lorna Road until mid-August when the owner, Jorge Juarez, stopped operating there after the city revised its food truck regulations and began enforcing them.
If you’ve noticed a dramatic reduction in the number of food trucks lining the roads or set up in parking lots in Hoover, there’s a reason for that.
The Hoover City Council recently revamped the city’s food truck regulations after the city started getting complaints about food trucks operating illegally.
Previously, people were allowed to set up food trucks in nonresidential districts as long as they met certain criteria, City Planner Mac Martin said. They had to have permission from the property owner. They could stay there no more than three consecutive days. They could not have seating, signage or tents, and they could not be within 200 feet of a restaurant, Martin said.
But as city code enforcers began checking out complaints, “every location we came across was violating at least one of those provisions, if not multiple provisions,” he said.
Essentially, the food trucks in many cases were setting up as permanent additions to the property, he said. Some of them may have taken the food trucks away at night, but they were back the next day in the same spot, over and over again, he said. Many of them also had seating, signs and tents.
“We were to the point where those operations were setting up all over town,” Martin said.
There was concern from some food truck operators who expressed an interest in following city regulations but found their competitors were not being made to follow the same rules, and there also was concern with having food trucks set up in close proximity to restaurants that had made a more significant capital investment to be in the city, Martin said.
There also were some food trucks that were setting up in locations that were not good for public safety, such as being in a public right of way or another location that was interfering with traffic visibility. Food trucks and their customers also were taking up parking that was designated for other businesses in shopping centers, and in some cases customers were parking on public right of way, he said.
Additionally, there was some concern about the aesthetics of having so many food trucks popping up all over town in a haphazard manner, Martin said. “It may not have been giving off the best impression of Hoover along our highway corridors,” he said.
Instead of issuing a lot of violations and tying up Municipal Court, city leaders decided to rework their food truck regulations and create a new food truck court zoning designation that would allow developers to create a spot for food trucks in commercial districts with some better planning for them.
The new regulations still allow for food trucks at special events with designated time frames and allow for them in planned office and planned industrial districts, but only with certain conditions. The trucks can only be set up during the time of operation of the businesses on the property and be designed for employees and patrons of those businesses. They also must be set up in accordance with the fire code and have a place on the property for customers to use the bathroom.
Finally, the new food court truck zoning would require developers of such courts to have utility access for the trucks and to meet minimum standards for parking, landscaping, bathroom access and covered seating.
“It would actually function more like a permanent business,” Martin said. “[But] the roadside setup that some of our food trucks have been operating as — that is no longer permitted.”
The new regulations took effect June 22.
