LOS ANGELES — One month into the sidewalk vending overhaul that made Hollywood the city’s test district, the numbers describe two different programs, depending on which building you count from.

Counted from the permit counter on Wilcox, the overhaul is ahead of schedule. As of Friday the city had taken 214 applications in the test district and issued 67 permits, against a projection of 120 issued by Labor Day — a pace the program’s staff, who watched 41 permits go out in the first two weeks, now describe as on track and accelerating.

Counted from the county, the picture is the one every vendor already knows. A city permit does not put a food cart on the sidewalk; that requires the county health certification, and the county’s queue is running six to ten weeks. Of the 67 city permits issued, 19 holders have completed county review. The first vendors who applied on the program’s opening day are clearing it now, a month in.

The two lines would be a bureaucratic curiosity if not for the calendar. Enforcement of the old rules is suspended through September 30. A vendor who applies today, and does everything right, will in the ordinary course still be waiting on the county when enforcement resumes October 1.

“We built a door and we are proud of the door, and it opens onto a hallway we do not control,” said Councilmember Alicia Rendón, whose office confirmed she will ask the council’s committee, when it returns in the last week of August, either to extend the enforcement pause or to treat a pending application as compliance until the county acts on it. “I prefer the second. A vendor who has done everything the law asks should not be citable because two governments cannot agree on a week.”

Councilmember Whit Bogardus, who supported the overhaul, opposes a blanket extension. “The fix for a slow line is to staff the line, not to announce the line is imaginary,” he said, adding that he would support the pending-application approach if it carries a hard end date. The county health department, asked about its queue, said certification volume in the district is “unprecedented” and that it has requested two additional inspectors in its fall budget cycle.

The committee’s late-August agenda, it should be said, is becoming a crowded room: the same session is due the held-over Vine Street bike lane study, and the Walk of Fame accounting motion is waiting behind it. The arithmetic of a five-week recess, as this page’s neighbors on the opinion side observed last week, has not improved with rest.

Then there is the bench.

Readers of this newspaper’s business pages know the situation of Marisol Quintero, whose newsstand near Hollywood and Cherokee — the Boulevard’s last, bolted to its corner since 1981 — was saved by the ordinance’s legacy clause but must pass an access inspection by September 30, and cannot: a bus bench installed in 2011 leaves 44 inches of clear sidewalk where the federal standard requires 48. In July, the transportation department said it would look at moving the bench.

The department has now looked, and the answer, delivered to Ms. Rendón’s office on the 7th, is that the bench does not exactly belong to the city. It sits under the citywide street-furniture contract — the same advertising agreement that supplies the city’s bus shelters, and the same one that surfaced last month in the shade ordinance debate, where staff were instructed to stop building policy on top of it. Under that contract, the vendor company has 90 days to act on a relocation request, and the city pays a per-move fee. The department logged its request on August 5. Ninety days from August 5 is the first week of November.

Ms. Quintero’s deadline remains September 30. The inspecting office, asked whether it could issue a conditional pass while the bench is in the vendor’s queue, said its categories are pass, fail and cure period, and that cure periods attach to a stand’s own deficiencies, not to obstructions the stand does not own. City staff, to their evident discomfort, agree that the rules as written find her stand deficient because of an object she has no power to move, installed thirty years after her stand last moved anything.

Ms. Rendón’s office says the simplest fix — scheduling the inspection itself for after the bench relocates — is under discussion with the inspecting office, which has not said no. It has also not said yes.

Elsewhere in the program, the case for the overhaul continues to be made by the people it was written for. Efraín Cordero, whose Selma Avenue fruit cart operated for years in the informal economy the old rules produced, holds city permit number 9. His county inspection is August 28, and he has spent part of his summer explaining the paperwork, in two languages, to other vendors at the counter on Wilcox.

Ms. Quintero, for her part, has stopped waiting for the phone to ring. On Friday afternoon, between customers, she took her own tape measure to the gap between her counter and the bench, as she does most weeks now, and reported the finding without drama.

“Forty-four inches. The bench has ninety days and I have fifty,” she said. “The tape does not care about either of us.”