After long waits for permits, Snohomish County vendors may find relief

EVERETT — In response to backlash over wait times, the Snohomish County Board of Health this week aimed to give some relief to mobile food vendors.

The measure unanimously approved Tuesday grants partial credits toward fees if permits are delayed.

There’s just one problem: If the policy was in place the past two years, no businesses would have qualified for the credit.

The ordinance will allow food truck owners who have waited more than 12 weeks for permit approval to credit temporary application fees toward their annual permit cost.

The board voted 4-0 to approve the ordinance Tuesday. The goal is to hold the county accountable for wait times while allowing newer businesses to keep operating, said Jared Mead, a Board of Health member who also serves on the Snohomish County Council.

“To me, it seems like baby steps. That’s not nearly as far as I’d want to go,” Mead said last week. “But at least we’re looking at the food truck operators who are struggling and saying, ‘Government, help us,’ and we’re saying, ‘We hear you, let’s fix that.’”

Vendors have to meet a number of conditions to be eligible for the credit, including being in good standing with the county’s health department — by not operating without a permit or outside the boundaries of a permit.

Between January 2023 and now, the county issued 19 temporary permits to businesses while reviewing their annual permits. Only one of those was issued to a vendor who had waited more than 12 weeks, but the vendor would have been disqualified from the credit for operating without a permit, said Tony Colinas, the environmental health assistant director at the Health Department.

This summer, vendors criticized the permitting process for mobile food units after staff turnover at the county health department and an influx of applications led to wait times of nearly five months. To earn money in the meantime, business owners paid hundreds of dollars for temporary permits to sell food and drinks at events.

For example, Melinda Grenier, spent over $1,000 on temporary permits earlier this year for her Arlington-based company, Hay Girl Coffee, while waiting for her annual permit. The health department denied her permit in August.

Costs for temporary permits range from $100 to $250 per event, depending on the type of food. Applications filed within 14 days of an event are also charged an $80 late fee. Annual permits cost between $440 and $915.

When a vendor applies for a food truck permit, they are first required to pay a $1,000 plan review fee. After the plan is approved and they pass an inspection, they are issued an invoice for their first annual permit. The credits a mobile food unit would receive, if eligible, would be used toward their first annual permit.

Credits would only apply to temporary fees incurred after the 12-week waiting period — starting from the day the business submitted a plan review application — and they cannot exceed the full cost of an annual permit application fee.

The county’s food safety program has seen “systemic challenges,” Health Director Dennis Worsham said in July. The health department typically has two full-time plan reviewers to review permit applications, which reached a rate of 44 per month last year. But after a supervisor and two of the county’s plan reviewers quit, the department went into crisis mode.

It’s not an easy job, either. Plan reviewers have to be experts on the state’s extensive safety code and face frequent complaints. In July, Ragina Gray, the county’s environmental health director, called it “highly political, high pressure and thankless” work.

Now, vendors will have some way of recouping money spent on temporary fees. But the Board of Health — which previously said its goal is to complete permit reviews in four to six weeks — wants to go further. The board said it hopes to petition the county to hire another full-time employee to speed up the application process without compromising food safety.

“My support for this motion is there, but I really think the other step of adding the FTE and creating the resilience that department needs, that’s really the key issue here,” said Desmond Skubi, a community stakeholder on the board, at Tuesday’s meeting.

When Mead originally raised the idea of helping with temporary permit fees through prorated temporary permits in September, some board members raised concerns, including budgetary impacts and the desire not to rush staff who were already overworked. After reworking the ordinance, it found unanimous support in Tuesday’s meeting.

“I’m glad it’s just an administrative process,” County Council and Board of Health member Megan Dunn said Tuesday. “I still stand by my comments that we have to be thinking of this in a public health way, and we should not be rushing staff or defunding their departments. That’s the wrong kind of motivation. But I appreciate the efforts to get this into an area that is more enforcement and less punitive.”

Will Geschke: 425-339-3443; william.geschke@heraldnet.com; X: @willgeschke.