Court rules Evanston food truck case can move forward

The Liberty Justice Center’s legal challenge to Evanston’s anti-competitive food-truck law took an important step forward this week, as Cook County Circuit Court Judge Jean Prendergast Rooney denied the city government’s motion to dismiss our lawsuit’s claims that the city’s law violates the due process and equal protection guarantees of the Illinois Constitution. The Liberty...

The Liberty Justice Center’s legal challenge to Evanston’s anti-competitive food-truck law took an important step forward this week, as Cook County Circuit Court Judge Jean Prendergast Rooney denied the city government’s motion to dismiss our lawsuit’s claims that the city’s law violates the due process and equal protection guarantees of the Illinois Constitution.

The Liberty Justice Center brought the case in August 2012 on behalf of Jim Nuccio and Gabriel Wiesen, owners of the popular Beavers Coffee & Donuts food truck. They want to be allowed to serve customers in Evanston, but an ordinance the city adopted in 2010 says that you can’t operate a food truck in Evanston unless you already own a “licensed food establishment,” such as a brick-and-mortar restaurant, in Evanston. Jim and Gabriel have a lot of experience safely operating a food truck, but they don’t own a restaurant or other food establishment in Evanston, so the city denied their application for a food-truck license.

Evanston’s rule obviously exists for just one reason: to protect Evanston restaurants from food-truck competition. That isn’t a legitimate purpose under the Illinois Constitution, which requires that all laws restricting individual rights bear some reasonable relationship to serving the public’s health, safety or welfare.

In its motion to dismiss the case, the city argued, among other things, that the Evanston’s home-rule powers entitle it to regulate food trucks however it pleases and that the court should dismiss the case without considering any evidence. In her ruling from the bench denying the city’s motion, the judge disagreed.

Thus, after more than a year of preliminary legal wrangling, the case will now move forward over the months ahead.

Meanwhile, watch our video about Jim and Gabriel’s fight for food-truck freedom.