FORT WORTH -- For nine years, Luwana Carver operated popular hot dog stands outside the Tarrant County Administration Building and near City Hall.
Over the years, she came to know many of her customers by name as she chatted with them and made fresh-squeezed lemonade."They were like family to me," Carver saidBut on Aug. 12, she packed up for good, shuttering her business, Top Dog Hot Dog.She still has the rights to those two locations, but she was required to give up three other downtown spots after there were complaints to the city that she had a virtual monopoly. That, coupled with the city rewriting the ordinance rules establishing minimum operating hours, was too much for Carver."We had several vendors call," said Scott Hanlan, assistant code compliance director. "Nothing against Top Dog, they weren't doing anything wrong; but they only had two carts and were primarily utilizing a couple of the locations and only sporadically using other three."Yet after all of the efforts to attract new pushcarts, an online auction to license five locations to vendors ended Thursday without any bidders."No bids were received, which is surprising because we had five to eight interested parties who were interested in those fixed sites," said city spokesman Jason Lamers. "We fully anticipated a response."Lamers said the city will regroup and decide how to move forward with the pushcart sites.But Carver said there's a reason no one bid. She said she needed five spaces to make a profit because many of the locations only attract customers on certain days."The thing is, the city doesn't know the hot dog business -- I do," Carver said. "Some of the spaces are in terrible locations, like behind some bushes or on the wrong side of the street. And, there's some like the convention center, which are only profitable when a convention is going on during the weekend."New competition, such as the Yum-Yum food trucks, also didn't help. "Yum-Yum massacred me for the first two months they were here," Carver said.For now, Carver is working at Taco Bell and hoping to find a buyer for her food carts. But she kept an eye on the bidding process to see if the any of the other vendors who lobbied for her spaces decided to bid. She wasn't surprised by the lack of responses."I would feel sorry for anyone who took those spaces," she said.Bill Hanna, 817-390-7698Have more to add? News tip? Tell us
