Florists Ignite War of the Roses Against Vendors : Ventura: The shop owners say ‘bucket people’ steal their business. They ask the City Council to ban street sales.

A flower war has sprouted on the sidewalks of Ventura, baring the roots of a bitter rivalry between the cultivated professional florists and the freewheeling “bucket people.”

The florists accuse the bucket-bearing street flower vendors of breaking the law and undercutting the legitimate business they have taken years to build, by peddling inferior posies at cut-rate prices.

“There’s enough florists in town without us having to compete,” said Peggy Buchanan, part owner of Primrose Florists on Main Street. “These bucket people that come in every holiday are just killing us . . . . This Mother’s Day, they were everywhere, all around in town.”

But the bucket people say their very visibility actually helps bring business to the florists’ shops in Ventura by encouraging buyers who want to send fancier flowers than they can buy on the pavement or who want to send arrangements out of town.

“My personal opinion is that a flower is God’s smile captured,” said Jean Brown, plucking a multicolored fistful of flowers from buckets Tuesday at the corner of Pierpont Boulevard and Seaward Avenue.

“When people see a stand like this, it reminds them of their loved ones in another city,” she said. “They go, ‘Oh wonderful, I should send a bouquet to Aunt May.’ ”

Florists and bucket people have long disagreed about how to sell flowers.

But the budding battle blossomed fully in Monday’s City Council meeting, when Main Street florists Joan Schwab and Robert Buchanan complained that the bucket people have gotten out of hand.

Schwab, who runs a shop called Ashwood on Main, told the council that the ranks of the bucket people are multiplying on holidays and weekends, and that they are illegally selling their wares on street corners and darting in and out of stopped traffic to sell flowers.

She asked the council to pass an ordinance, similar to laws in Oxnard and Camarillo, outlawing street-side flower sales.

Robert Buchanan, who co-owns Primrose Florists, complained that the city refused several years ago to let him put up a flower kiosk at the corner of Seaward Avenue and Pierpont Boulevard.

“Imagine my amazement when, about five months ago, somebody put up a rickety, obviously unsafe, horrible-looking shed,” he told the council members.

“The thing we’re really pushing for is to get the city of Ventura to enforce the laws that are already in place,” Schwab said Tuesday.

But Ventura Mayor Richard Francis told the two that he approved of street-side flower sales, adding, “What’s out of sync is not this stand, but the ordinance.”

The city is losing sales taxes to the bucket people’s bosses, who run a cash business, dropping off vendors and flowers in the morning and picking up the money in the evenings without paying taxes, Schwab said.

“I don’t have a problem with the corner guys,” said Linda Williams, who manages the kiosk on Pierpont Boulevard and a similar one on Telegraph Road in the College Liquor and Deli parking lot. “I think everyone should have a chance to sell their product in America, and I think consumers should make the choice of what kind of product they want to have and how much they want to pay.”

She said she operates with all the necessary city and state business permits and pays sales taxes. Her kiosks have been in place for many months, operating in the private parking lots with the permission of the property owners.

Williams’ sales are legal, but the kiosks themselves violate city building codes, said Ventura Code Enforcement Officer Sherry Jeffery. Williams has received a warning and could be subject to city and county fines totaling $250 a day if she continues the violation, Jeffery said.

But Jeffery said she encouraged Williams to ask the City Council to change the street vending ordinance to allow the kiosks. And Williams said she will appear before the council June 24 to do just that.

Peggy Buchanan of Primrose Florists said bucket vendors’ flowers often wilt sooner because they don’t have the refrigerators that florists use to keep flowers fresh.

“The public figures they are getting a bargain, but they are not,” she said. Flowers that wilt prematurely will discourage people from buying flowers and deprive legitimate florists of business, she said.

Schwab said the bucket people aren’t professional flower-arrangers and that inferior nosegays also can turn off the public’s desire for flowers.

But Brown said she often warns customers when flowers are past their prime and even discounts the price.

And she said she lets customers choose the flowers they want. “They’re saying, ‘Let’s put one of those in there and let’s have one of those,’ ” she said. “It’s fun to watch their creativity. To me, they’re the artist.”

“Every florist in town has tried to get that corner,” Williams said of her Pierpont location. It is the withering economy that has made the florists itchy, not her sales, she said.

Last Saturday, someone spray-painted an obscenity on the back of her kiosk implying that her flowers were inferior, Williams said.

She does not know who did it, nor would she hazard a guess.

“I just don’t have suspicions. I don’t live that way,” she said. “I just see people living in fear that they’re going to lose their business and with the economy the way it is, things are really rough for people and they just find any scapegoat they can. I’m not looking for a fight, but I will stand up for my rights as being an American.”

The council took no action on the issue Monday.