“Our city has grown to a point where we can no longer allow our streets to be a recreational playground,” Councilman John Reichard said. “There was a time when we could. We didn’t have the traffic. We didn’t have the visitation, and now we do.”
News Herald Reporter
PANAMA CITY BEACH — Scooter rental business owners are seething after the Panama City Beach Council on Thursday night voted to shutter their businesses in three years.
The council, after hearing Police Chief Drew Whitman say scooter rental law enforcement is taking time away from his limited staff dealing with serious crimes, passed a motion to eliminate the businesses after three years. The vote was 4-1, with councilman Phil Chester dissenting.
A motion to pass an emergency ordinance to ban scooter rental drivers from the road after 5 p.m. drew a 3-2 vote, with Phil Chester and Josie Strange dissenting, but ultimately failed because under state law a supermajority of four votes is required.
Three years ago, former Councilman Rick Russell proposed that scooter rental businesses be phased out over three years, but it went nowhere after the business owners protested. Since then, however, laws have been passed to reduce the number of scooters at each business to 60.
“Our city has grown to a point where we can no longer allow our streets to be a recreational playground,” Councilman John Reichard said. “There was a time when we could. We didn’t have the traffic. We didn’t have the visitation, and now we do.”
Whitman said his department gets complaints from businesses about scooter rentals taking up parking spaces for cars and the drivers making reckless traffic moves such as driving down the sidewalk at night and weaving in and out of traffic.
“It’s a miracle that none of those kids have been killed,” Reichard said. He then made the motion to eliminate the businesses in three years.
Mayor Mike Thomas said scooters are not just a problem in the evenings, “and it keeps (Whitman) from investigating and being proactive on other things.”
City Attorney Amy Myers said Friday an ordinance will have to be brought back and approved by the council twice to cement the decision. She said the wording may not call for phasing out the scooters, just eliminating them after a certain number of years.
Myers said the city should not have to pay business damages to scooter rental businesses that have been able to recoup their investment on the scooters. But she added that if the timeline is unreasonable for a particular business to recoup that investment and the business establishes proof it is indeed suffering a loss, the city might be liable for some compensation. Myers said an economic consultant would have to be hired to determine the economic effect of closing the businesses.
“We hired an economist that was part of the last lawsuit, so a lot of legwork has been done,” she said.
Colleen Swab, owner of California Cycles that has been in business for 32 years, said Friday her business planned to sue the city once again over its decision. The company won a previous lawsuit against the city when an appeals judge in Tallahassee ruled the city’s insurance and vests laws went too far, that those requirements should be determined by the state instead.
Rick Roof, another owner of the company, said the laws the city have passed have cost his business dearly, and he is tired of it. Roof said scooter rental businesses have been used as a “scapegoat” for crime problems, and that Thomas has a vendetta against his company that goes back decades.
“We have lost a lot of money,” he said.