So much for that…

Amazing, how good ideas are so quickly snuffed out in Hudson. I liked Peter Ratcliffe’s post about taco trucks, chuck wagons, canteen-mobiles, whatever you want to call them. Sure, there’d be problems, but what can you expect in a town where thinking outside the box is grounds for suspicion?

Rod Hodgson notes that food trucks are illegal in Hudson. So are granny suites, glare-y floodlights, bikes without licences, dogs off the leash, solar panels, spitting in public and using shipping containers for storage. Feel free to add to my list of useless, unenforced bylaws. I see it as a citizen’s job to blow the whistle on stupidity.

Hudson’s SDC has a problem with food trucks. We won’t digress into a discussion of the legality of this organization’s right to exist, let alone spend taxpayer’s dollars without accountability or transparency. I’ll confine myself to saying Hudson’s beleaguered commercial sector has no need for self-appointed, unaccountable sheriffs and enforcers of who can do what.

Back to food trucks. Why is it that someone can sell prepared food at the Hudson Farmer’s Market or any number of other public events but not at Jack Layton Park? Because the town says so? As good a reason as any to challenge the status quo, I say.

Here’s a suggestion: Ask local restaurant owners what they think. That should take half an hour at most. Ask them if they’d be interested in going mobile and whether they have any suggestions.

By the way, I have one. Rather than blowing a pile on fireworks and all the other fake frivolity at this year’s Canada Day  150th, Hudson should think of co-hosting home-and-home street fairs with our First Nations brothers and sisters across the river. A lot of them have Hudson roots and it would be interesting and fun.

Trust me when I say the Mohawks will have no legal problems with food wagons on either side of their river.