Birmingham Alabama residents may be the next group of people in the country that will experience the recent explosion of food trucks in their area.

According to WBRC, Councilmember Johnathan Austin is interested in looking at the mobile food industry to assist the city’s efforts to help generate revenue for the city through business licensing and sales taxes.

Although at the early stages of their investigation, Austin is a proponent of allowing the industry to grow within the city as long as it is done responsibly. “For instance, the city of New York has street vendors throughout the city. They’re everywhere but they have certain rules and laws that the city has,” said Austin. “We are looking at to maybe replicate those laws in the city of Birmingham so that it just provides more uniformity.”

A one-time opponent to the industry, Operation New Birmingham, President Michael Calvert says he made a mistake and has dropped his opposition to a food truck operator who had been told he could no longer park downtown.

Because food trucks are fairly new to Birmingham, the city does not have specific regulations governing them, Calvert said. The food truck operator in question was Jason Parkman, owner of the Spoonfed Grill food truck.

Parkman would like to see the food-truck trend take off in Birmingham, too.

“All I want to do is bring something special downtown that I think can build and we can have a multitude of trucks along with the restaurants already in place,” he said. “I think there is plenty of money for everybody downtown, personally.”

We applaud councilmember Austin and Mr. Calvert in their openness to the industry, and hope they is able to succeed in bring more food truck vendors to the streets of Birmingham. With so many examples of the mobile food industry flourishing across the country, we are sure it will not take too long for them to be able to work together to craft the proper legislation to bring high quality gourmet food trucks to the people of this great Southern city.