Fred Ronstadt might be right about the city's new peddler's ordinance - once the dust settles.

"The council has taken a 40-pound sledgehammer to something that required a scalpel," the Tucson City Councilman has said several times since the council voted to completely deconstruct the city's peddling ordinance - as the new version entered the code at the beginning of this month.

Since April 4 when the ordinance went into effect, chaos has ensued.

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Charges are being thrown claiming the new rules will hamper street-vending businesses in and around Tucson. Some say it will hamper those who set up shop during special events such as the semi-annual Fourth Avenue Street Fair and the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show in February.

One of those claims comes from Steven Wind, a doctoral candidate at the University of Arizona who has been selling handicrafts twice a year during the Fourth Avenue Fair from his spot in the driveway of the Cabat Studio, 627 N. Fourth Ave. Under the new rules, Wind's site no longer is in compliance and thus he has been told by city zoning administrator Walter Tellez that he is not eligible to be licensed.

"My understanding is that he is not set up within the Fourth Avenue District, which means he has to live up to all of the criteria of the ordinance," Tellez said, confirming that the only exception for Fourth Avenue and Downtown is the allowable distance from a curb or right-of-way pavement, which is four feet in those areas, compared to 20 feet elsewhere in the city.

"He's just blowing smoke, trying to play games with words," Wind said. "These regulations are designed to protect neighborhoods, but it has also punished most of us vendors for things that are unrelated to what started all this discussion in the first place."

Crafting of the new ordinance came into play about two years ago, when there were several complaints on the south side of town with street vendors operating in the late evening and early morning hours in residential areas, creating noise and nuisance hazards.

Council member Steve Leal, D-Ward 5, headed up the process of reworking the ordinance.

"This process involved the neighborhoods, the vendors, business owners, some city staff," Leal said, claiming the new ordinance addresses some of the problems that came about on the south side.

But did it wind up adversely affecting everyone who lives day-to-day selling their wares? Are there unintended consequences for these good intentions?

At the time the new ordinance was put in place, more than 1,000 vendors applied for new licenses. But less than 10 percent of those applications had been in compliance with the new rules. That prompted the city to bring the ordinance back under consideration a day after it took effect to look at how to make it more "vendor-friendly."

But it appears the problem was a lack of education by the city staff in its interpretation of the ordinance.

Leal said that staff told vendors that the ordinance required a 100-foot separation between vendors on adjacent sites and an architectural drawing of a site that is on a commercial lot. But there's no such language for either of those in the ordinance. In other words, city staff had provided incorrect information to vendors.

Tellez admitted his staff did give incorrect information about the architectural requirement but would correct the mistake.

Leal also said requiring a 300-foot setback from an intersection of an arterial or collector street was not adopted by the council last fall yet was in the ordinance. New language adopted last week deleted that clause, which some think will be key to making more of the vendors in compliance with the new rules. But not everyone.

"I think these changes will help some of the peddlers, but I still think that a majority of them will still not meet the new requirements," Ronstadt said. "If the city had just done a better job of enforcing the noise and nuisance ordinances that are already on the books, we wouldn't be in this position of jeopardizing so many of these hard-working people from making their living. The whole thing is reprehensible."

Ronstadt was the lone dissenter among council members on changing the ordinance in the first place. He also voted against the changes two weeks ago and against adoption of the revised rule last week.

Tellez agreed with Ronstadt's assessment of the impact.

"The really big key to this ordinance is the 100-foot setback from residential property," Tellez said. "That is the one big change from the previous ordinance that I think will affect the vendors more than anything. There will be a large number of vendors whose regular site now won't be in compliance. And those people would then have to find a new site."

The clause is being enforced from the property line, not from the structure - an important point, since many residential property lines end at a sidewalk, compared to a residential structure having a setback of several feet from the sidewalk - for a driveway and/or front yard.

The analysis leads to a possible conclusion that the changing of the ordinance, designed to stop the late-night business in residential areas from a handful of vendors on the south side, may wind up serving as an overall anti-peddlers ordinance with very restrictive rules. Tucsonans may well see fewer hot dogs and curios being sold on the street in the future.

"To put these new regulations on the shoulders of our smallest of small-business owners is unconscionable," Ronstadt said. "This ordinance will punish these people for simply wanting to make an honest living for their families."

David Woodburn may be contacted at dwoodburn@azbiz.com or (520) 295-4239.