Food truck park closing, EV chargers being removed

By Randy Bell

A couple of promising initiatives in Clinton to bring food trucks to a central location and to operate the city’s first public charging stations for electric vehicles (EVs) are being discontinued.

The Firehouse Food Truck Park, which failed to gain traction among vendors, is closing. And the five charging stations there and at the other Clinton parks will be removed because of wi-fi issues which prevented drivers from being able to pay for a charge.

According to Mayor Will Purdie, the food truck park sign is being taken down at Fire Station 2 on Old Vicksburg Road, and the parking spaces which had been set aside for the trucks will now be available for use by pickleball players at the nearby Towne Park courts.

“Certainly, we’ve not seen that being utilized as we would have liked,” Purdie says. “And we want to make sure all of our [City] property is performing at its highest and best use.”

For the time being, at least, food trucks wanting to operate in Clinton will need a conditional use permit.

“The City would have to approve any individual food truck in an individual spot,” the mayor says. “I’ve asked the City Attorney and the Community Development Director to help me in looking at some type of process where we could maintain some control over where they’re located [but] stop short of having to do a conditional use permit.”

Ward 1 Alderwoman Karen Godfrey was part of an ad hoc committee which developed plans for the food truck park and says it seemed like a good idea at the time.

“We thought with the pickleball courts, that would be an ideal place to be,” she says. “It was just a solution to corral everybody in one spot and not be all over town. We wanted to give it a good shot the way we had seen some other cities do. And here, it just didn’t work.”

The food truck park, as it was set up in November of 2024, was prepared to offer six-month leases for four vehicles along with two spaces for daily use. The trucks were required to operate from 11 a.m. until 9 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday, and were given the option to have Sunday and Monday hours, as well. Alcohol sales were not permitted.

The plan was to give food trucks operating elsewhere in Clinton thirty days to move to the Firehouse park. That never happened, although some vendors did make brief visits.

The EV charging stations around the city were the result of a partnership between the non-profit organization Adopt a Charger and Entergy-Mississippi. The equipment was installed last year at no cost to the City at five locations—Traceway Park, Brighton Park, Towne Park, the Clinton Visitor Center and the Olde Towne Depot.

Purdie says, even though the City didn’t have any up-front costs related to the charging stations, there would have been some expense to make them usable.

“We’re not allowed to give the electricity away,” he says. “That’s an impermissible donation for the City. So, we had set up a method for the end-user to be charged.”

But only one of the charging stations had internet access, which was necessary to process the payments.

“Some of them are not close to buildings where they could pick up the wi-fi,” the mayor says. “So, it was going to require a relatively substantial equipment [purchase] at the City’s expense to get those up and running. At this point, I think we’ve decided to just back away from that.”

The Adopt a Charger website says the organization’s charging stations have been installed in fifteen states. In addition to Clinton, it lists Jackson, Raymond and Cleveland as other locations in Mississippi.

The funding for the Mississippi charging stations came from Entergy’s Environmental Initiatives Fund. The company says its one-time involvement concluded once the money was released to Adopt a Charger.

“To our knowledge, the charging stations continue to operate successfully in the other Mississippi locations,” says Entergy’s Senior Media Relations Specialist Tamica Smith Jeuitt.