In the spirit of nothing is sacred in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Hull selectmen have voted to ban ice cream trucks from town this summer.
“It’s a safety issue,” Town Manager Philip Lemnios said after the May 20 vote.
He explained that ice cream trucks travel along Beach Avenue, a narrow, sidewalk-less street separated by dunes from the town beach. For children to maintain social distancing and stay 6 feet apart while waiting to get ice cream, they would be in lines that potentially could stretch 40 feet down the road – an unsafe situation, he said.
“Hull loves ice cream; it’s just a safety issue of kids in the road,” Lemnios said, adding that there are still plenty of other places in town that sell ice cream that will not be affected.
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Selectwoman Jennifer Berardi-Constable was the only member of the five-person board to vote against the ice cream truck ban.
Constable said she voted against the ban because she thought the town could have required the trucks to make more frequent stops to avoid crowds and allow safe purchases, and because she worried the board would extend the ban to other businesses with window service.
“We are all living under new rules and we are going to have to trust or at least give people the chance to follow those rules as we proceed through a new normal,” she said.
Johanna Seltz can be reached at seltzjohanna@gmail.com.