El Paso moves forward to revise flea market regulations

El Paso deputy director of environmental services Kurt Fenstermacher briefs the city Legislative Review Committee in a Aug. 19 meeting (taken from an archived video on the city's Web site).

In February this year, a flea market vendor went to the city elders of El Paso, Texas, to complain about the regulations that govern his business. For example, sellers are required to always stay at their booths — no bathroom breaks, no sick days, no substitute sellers allowed. And the city charges vendors an $85 fee — whether they sell for a single day, or all year round. The need for reform was obvious to the El Paso Legislative Review Committee, the subset of the full City Council charged with oversight for ordinances, regulations, and laws.

But the discussion that followed expanded into a wholesale re-evaluation of the regulations that affect the city’s seven flea markets and one thousand licensed flea market vendors. “It really opened the door to further discussion about the whole vendor and flea market activity,” says Kurt Fenstermacher, department director of environmental services for the city.

Over the following months, two public outreach meetings were held to solicit feedback from the community. Possible changes to the way flea markets operate generated some concern and consternation, as reported on KTSM NewsChannel 9, and the El Paso Times. Vendors and market owners worried about the reach of big government. Those meetings gave Fenstermacher an awareness of the issues, and he then reported back to the Legislative Review Committee at a meeting on Aug. 19.

Topics discussed at that meeting included letting other people staff a booth and permanent rest room facilities at flea markets (six of the seven markets already have that). A number of solutions were considered, and the Committee directed Fenstermacher to implement several in new regulations. “I presented the findings from those two outreach meetings,” says Fenstermacher, “and got further direction, which was to come back to council with some amended ordinance language that could address some of these concerns.”

“On a vendor side, I think it’ll make things easier,” he says. “You know, $85 is a lot. If I want to vend for one weekend, that’s frankly a lot of money. So we’re looking at a garage-sale-type permit, or letting market managers have garage-sale-type tables.” Vendors at those tables would not have to pay the $85 fee.

“Times have changed, and there’s a way to make this work for everybody,” he adds. The next step is to rewrite the regulations, get those revisions okayed by legal counsel and the Legislative Review Committee, and then to put it in front of the full City Council for an up or down vote.

That will take about three months. “90 days is when I would expect to have an ordinance,” says Fenstermacher. “That 90-day timetable, frankly in my opinion, starts tomorrow. I would expect we’ll be ready to go by January.”

The city makes videos of its meetings available on the Web. The meeting of the Legislative Review Committee on the morning of Aug. 19 is available to view online as a streaming video archived on the city’s Web site — on that page, look for the morning meeting on Aug. 19 under “Legislative Review Committee Meeting” in the left side column. The interesting part of the meeting is about an hour and 18 minutes in.