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Township may update food truck ordinance

KAREN VIBERT-KENNEDY/Sun-Gazette Bill Lamey, owner of Taco Bill’s Taco Madness food truck, works in his truck at lunchtime along Lycoming Creek Road in Old Lycoming Township on Wednesday. The Old Lycoming Township supervisors will likely have updates to the food truck ordinances to vote on at their next meeting.

Old Lycoming Township supervisors discussed updating food truck ordinance and honored the township’s police officer of the year Tuesday night.

Township manager Bob Whitford said the community wants to know who is operating food trucks, “but we don’t want to discourage it,” he said.

Whitford said the purpose of the ordinance is to ensure vendors are complying with state Department of Agriculture licensing and that there have been no complaints from existing brick-and-mortar businesses.

“The businesses want these people to be here,” Whitford said. “There’s no sense in us re-inventing the wheel.”

He said the supervisors likely will have updates to the ordinance to vote on at their next meeting.

“We want to make it reasonable,” Supervisor Linda Mazzullo said.

At the start of the meeting, the Old Lycoming Township Police Department lined up to watch Patrolman Michael Engel accept the police officer of the year award from Mazzullo and police Chief Joseph Hope.

Mazzullo detailed Engel’s record over the previous year, including more than 200 arrests. She described an armed robbery Engel investigated, resulting in an arrest, and an investigation into an organized group committing thefts that led to a federal investigation and praised Engel’s integrity and professionalism.

“It’s a really hard selection process,” Hope said, in praising the work of all the department’s officers.

Another topic at the meeting was the township’s mulch pile, which is filled to capacity. In the past, supervisors said, the township sold permits to businesses to dispose of brush at the site and allowed township residents to check out keys with a security deposit so they could access the mulch pile — practices the supervisors may not bring back.

“It’s going to have to remain closed” if action isn’t taken, Whitford said.

“We have to put something into place so we don’t run into this again,” Supervisor David Shirn said.

One concern with allowing residents to check out keys, supervisors said, is that some residents either forfeited the deposit and didn’t return them or had copies made. Whitford said he is awaiting details on a keypad and code system. Mazzullo also said the township should consider ending permits for businesses to dispose brush at the site.

Supervisors voted unanimously to have Clinton County landfill take waste from the site to grind up to make more room, and tabled further action on permits or securing the mulch pile.

“It’s a work in progress,” Shirn said.

In other business, Old Lycoming supervisors:

• accepted Larry Straka’s resignation from the Old Lycoming Area Association and unanimously appointed Mazzullo to the position. The supervisors said there are no large projects on the horizon for the authority and they anticipate it will only meet three or four times a year. Mazzullo has prior experience on the board.

• heard an update on record-keeping practices. Whitford said the township is purging old unneeded records and properly disposing them while ensuring records that need to be kept are appropriately filed.

• heard an update on a fish fry that began Wednesday night and will be held every Friday night through and including Good Friday at the Old Lycoming Township fire hall and the Easter egg hunt at 11 a.m., March 24 at the park on Green Avenue next to the township building.

• heard gratitude from Shirn for the work on securing a $622,000 grant to purchase a sewer vacuum truck to clean out storm drains and other lines.

• heard concerns about a malfunctioning street light at Dewey and Linwood avenues. Supervisors said repeated efforts to call PPL about the light have not yielded results. Hope and Whitford said they would check on other officials with the companies the township can contact.

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