Oceanside Puts a Chill on Noisy Ice Cream Vendors : Nuisance: Council votes for ordinance controlling music after residents complain that it is leaving them in poor humor.

Oceanside put the bite on the ice cream man Wednesday as the City Council moved to stop truck vendors from constantly driving through neighborhoods and playing loud music.

The council voted, 3 to 0, for a new ordinance, modeled after a measure passed in Vista last year, requiring trucks to quiet amplified music, undergo safety inspections and restrict the number of passes through neighborhoods.

“For six years, we’ve been asking the industry to clean up its act,” Councilman Sam Williamson said. “This has been a long time coming.”

However, 17 vendors and an ice cream distributor asked the council not to let their business melt away.

“This is American, just like baseball,” protested Wanda Bugaj, of San Marcos-based Quality Discount Ice Cream Distributors, which sells to vendors, convenience stores and markets in San Diego and Orange counties.

Claiming that vendors could wind up on welfare, Bugaj said: “You might drive a lot of these people out of their own enterprise. If they’re out of jobs, we’re going to have to support them in another way.”

One vendor, Frank Morales, told the council that he depends on driving an ice cream truck to pay his college tuition.

“The only thing I can do is sell ice cream,” said Morales, who has been in the business for six years. “This is an honest thing to do.”

But, after years of hearing citizen complaints, the council refused to get soft and mushy, politically speaking.

Councilwoman Nancy York defended the ordinance, saying it “is not designed to put ice cream trucks out of business” but is a necessary measure to remedy years of concerns about noise and other problems.

Indeed, amplified music, usually children’s tunes such as “Old Macdonald’s Farm,” has created a rocky road for some vendors.

And as in neighboring Vista, Oceanside residents frequently have told police and city officials that some ice cream trucks pass 10 times down the same street and might be unsafe.

“The trucks look very tacky, and I question their safety,” said Esther Newman, who lives on El Camino Real.

Although vendors were willing to accept parts of the ordinance, they were especially unhappy about a provision restricting music to 50 decibels.

“You cannot sell ice cream; (amplified music is) a means of advertisement,” said Nasser Palizban of Quality Discount.

The ordinance, which becomes final after a second reading, also keeps ice cream trucks at least 500 feet from schools, limits hours of operation to between 10 a.m. and 8 p.m. and prohibits trucks from driving down the same street more than twice in one hour.