“I'm not stealing, I'm not doing anything bad, I'm just earning a living,” Luis Sanchez told The Nevada Independent about working as a street vendor. “I am just earning an honest living.” 

Sanchez, and countless entrepreneurs just like him, are one step closer to having their industry made legal in Nevada. The signing of SB92 by Gov. Joe Lombardo earlier this month was hailed by activists as an effort to ensure street vendors have a clear statewide path to legitimizing their work. 

However, the bill leaves local governments with plenty of latitude to create overly restrictive licensure and regulatory hurdles for such entrepreneurs — leaving plenty of uncertainty about the future of the industry. 

After all, governments have an astoundingly poor track record when it comes to crafting new regulatory and licensure requirements on industries that have largely operated in the shadows. 

For example, when California passed a law in 2018 to decriminalize and legalize street vending for an estimated 10,000 underground food vendors around Los Angeles, local licensure and regulatory requirements rendered the statewide law effectively useless. 

As the Los Angeles Times opined just a couple years after the passage of California’s Safe Sidewalk Vending Act, “Street vending may be legal in California, but for the vendors selling sliced fruit, tacos and other food items it's nearly impossible to get a permit to operate without fear of penalty, particularly in Los Angeles County.”

The Times rightly pointed out that “public health regulations for selling food from a street cart remain so complicated, impractical and expensive that the vast majority of vendors have not — and cannot — get permitted.”

It wasn’t long before vendors and activists — who had initially seen the Safe Sidewalk Vending Act as the first step toward legitimizing the industry — learned that government regulatory hurdles would effectively price their version of the American dream out of reach. Food codes in Los Angeles, for example, banned the “slicing [of] fruit or reheating [of] previously prepared food” at a vending cart. It also required food to be prepared in commercial kitchen facilities and even mandated what kind of cart was deemed acceptable for the “sanitary” handling of food products. 

Such restrictions made virtually every taco cart in Los Angeles a violator of health codes and ballooned the start-up costs well beyond what the average taco vendor was able to afford.

Judging by Nevada’s track record of overbearing licensure and regulatory burdens on other industries throughout our economy, there’s little reason to believe local governments in the Silver State will be less onerous in their regulatory approaches. 

Despite its reputation for being a fairly pro-business state, Nevada is already one of the most expensive states in the nation for registering a new business — even greater than our tax-happy neighbor to the west. Furthermore, the Silver State has routinely topped the Institute for Justice’s list as the most burdensome state in the nation for licensure requirements on low-income professions. 

Such a track record of saddling low-income entrepreneurs and workers with the nation’s highest and most burdensome government fees doesn’t bode well for an industry composed primarily of immigrant workers with limited financial means. 

Nevada’s historically abysmal licensing and regulatory approach to low-income professions means activists and vendors working to decriminalize their industry will have plenty more battles with government officials before they are free to operate “in the open.” Indeed, during the hearings for SB92 we received a glimpse at the long list of “health and safety” concerns likely to be used as excuses for implementing overbearing regulatory requirements. 

Sen. Lisa Krasner (R-Reno), for example, expressed her concerns over whether or not consumers could be confident food from such carts would be fit for consumption. 

“How would someone like me who's walking on the street and wants to stop and buy food from one of these roaming vendors know if they're certified or not?” she asked. “How would I know if the food from these roaming street vendors is safe and clean … How do I know it's the type of meat they say it is?”

According to governments all across the nation, the answer to such questions often seems to be the imposition of certifications, licenses and regulatory requirements. However, licenses, certificates and even health inspections don’t exactly provide the kind of guarantees Krasner is seeking. 

After all, people still get food poisoning from plenty of brick-and-mortar establishments required to adhere to stringent health and safety guidelines — and a quick trip into the kitchen of any number of restaurants would be enough for most people to question the efficacy of many food-safety regulations. Indeed, the reputational costs associated with spreading food-borne illnesses is a far more effective incentive for safe food handling than the risk of government fines for violating (often incoherent) safety procedures. 

In other words, if consumers share Krasner’s doubts about a cart’s food-safety procedures, their best bet is to simply not do business with that vendor — regardless of what licensing bona fides the proprietor has purchased from some government bureaucracy. 

Compiling untold amounts of regulatory requirements on the industry will do little to alleviate concerns over food safety — although it will certainly push many vendors into the black market due to the financial burden of compliance. Los Angeles’ heavy-handed approach toward regulating “food safety,” for example, didn’t eradicate unsanitary food conditions among street vendors — it merely resulted in vendors continuing to operate outside the law.

The passage of SB92 certainly signals an important first step in bringing vendors such as Sanchez out of the shadows and into the legal economy. However, truly making the American dream accessible to such hard-working entrepreneurs will require continued diligence and activism to ensure local governments don’t bury that dream in a mountain of red tape. 

After all, the American dream should be accessible to anyone willing to earn an honest living — even those who just want to sell a few snacks from food carts on Las Vegas sidewalks. 

Michael Schaus is a communications and branding expert based in Las Vegas, Nevada, and founder of Schaus Creative LLC — an agency dedicated to helping organizations, businesses and activists tell their story and motivate change. He has more than a decade of experience in public affairs commentary, having worked as a news director, columnist, political humorist, and most recently as the director of communications for a public policy think tank. Follow him at SchausCreative.com or on Twitter at @schausmichael.