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After seeing an increase in the number of complaints about late-night vendors from residents around North Frances Street, a Madison committee contemplating options Wednesday to change the situation.

The Vending Oversight Committee has played with the idea of eliminating vendors on Frances Street altogether since Jin’s Chicken and Fish, a popular food cart, faced several penalties, including temporarily having its license revoked.

The committee invited public comment after receiving several e-mails and complaints of noise disturbances caused by late-night vendors, but no visitors showed up to the meeting.

Street vending coordinator Warren Hansen mentioned the increase in police calls regarding late-night vending around Frances Street, but other committee members agreed the rise in police calls could not be directly correlated to the vending carts without further police information.

Discussion of moving some vendors to Library Mall also raised some questions among the committee members.

“I’d love it if some of the North Frances [vendors] would just go over to that block and try it,” Hansen said.

Due to $10,000 allocated to lighting in Mayor Dave Cieslewicz’s 2009 budget, brighter lights are expected to be scattered around Library Mall to make the area safer and more attractive to students and customers.

VOC member Rosemary Lee was hesitant to order street vendors to move around because they contribute to the community.

She added residents living around the late-night vending area like the Eleanor apartments, located at 405 N. Frances St., have voluntarily chosen to live in a place with late-night noise.

“If you want quiet at 10 o’clock at night, that’s not the place to live,” Lee said.

Committee member Matt Rockwell suggested creating an additional space for late-night vendors in the area between State Street Brats and the University Inn, just off of State Street.

“I would think that if we can find a way to get the food courts out of the parking stalls at the metered parking spots, we would be probably about halfway to a solution,” Rockwell said. “Being in those metered spots certainly entices vendors to get down early, to squat on spots, to just have to go and do a lot of things beyond what they would normally have to do.”

There was also discussion of a superiority system in which vendors are guaranteed spaces for vending at night based on the date they acquired their vending license.

Hansen talked about vendors near Camp Randall Stadium where superiority programs “created an orderly way of who gets what site and why.”

VOC member Austin McClendon said police officers should attend the next meeting to provide more data about complaint calls and added “inviting the vendors to the next meeting is of vital importance.”

“I am acknowledging that late-night vending has become successful enough that it’s growing and is more popular than it used to be, and it needs some structure,” Hansen said.