Looks like Melrose Avenue vendors will stay. Now, about all that trash...

Raise your plastic cups in celebration: It seems that Melrose Avenue vendors will stay.

Fans will not want for T-shirts or various foods on sticks during Hawkeye home football games, provided Iowa City Council members approve a zoning and planning board's recommendation to create a special conditional-use permit for game day commercial vendors.

Just a couple of months ago, Iowa City staff members recommended that council members shut down the vendors on city property just outside Kinnick Stadium.

Their point about out-of-control tailgating at university events was all but drowned out by the outcry from people who make good money - or spend it - at the impromptu near-Kinnick street fair. But they did have a point.

I'm glad to see this compromise. The permit idea should take care of public safety concerns by requiring vendors to take some common sense precautions (honestly, things they should have been doing all along), such as having fire extinguishers on hand.

Vendors also will be required to set up 2 feet from the sidewalk - out of pedestrians' way - also not a big deal for most vendors.

Now there's the question of garbage.

Trash and bodily fluids also were high on the list of complaints earlier this spring when city staff recommended shuttering Melrose vendors.

But zoning and planning board members threw up their hands on that one.

“The University of Iowa has the primary responsibility to address these issues,” they recently wrote in a statement to forward to the council. They recommended that city staff meet with UI officials to come up with a plan.

It's important that they do, and that the solution to this second objection to Melrose vending doesn't get lost to finger pointing.

Some Hawkeye fans like to say Melrose Neighborhood residents have no right to complain. After all, they bought into the place knowing full well what happens there.

But that doesn't take into account longtime residents who have had a front-row seat as the Hawkeye tailgating scene devolved from harmless weekend hell-raising to drunken free-for-all.

No-holds-barred tailgaters who are creating the trash and vandalism might find it an inconvenient truth that people actually live there. But the city can't be so oblivious.

The game day permit shows it's possible to balance game day traditions and city concerns.

Now do that on behalf of Melrose residents tired of their property being used as game day trash cans, or worse.

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jennifer.hemmingsen@sourcemedia.net