Seattle, WA
Seattle Shuffles Scooter Share Deck, Library Invests in Social Services, Campaign Forms to Fight Potential Cannabis Tax – PubliCola
1. Fowl, a scooter supplier that’s already ubiquitous in cities throughout the nation, will quickly enter the Seattle market, whereas Spin and the venture-backed sit-down scooter firm Wheels will now not be seen on Seattle streets. Along with Fowl, Hyperlink and Lime will proceed as scooter suppliers in Seattle.
The Seattle Division of Transportation introduced the scooter shuffle on its web site final week, simply weeks after publishing the outcomes of a controversial, nonscientific survey concluding that extra scooter riders are injured whereas using than beforehand reported.
Seattle’s relationship with scooters (and bikesharing) has lengthy been ambivalent. In 2020, two and a half years after banning scooters solely, the town took a child step ahead by issuing permits to 3 firms for 500 scooters every. Since then, the town has expanded its scooter permits to permit every of three suppliers to place 2,000 scooters on the streets; Lime, which supplies each e-assist bikes and scooters, has a fourth allow for a complete of two,000 bikes and scooters.
In line with SDOT’s scoring matrix, Spin narrowly misplaced out to Fowl, Hyperlink, and Lime after scoring barely decrease on two measures: Parking (which incorporates insurance policies the corporate carried out to ensure folks parked accurately and the way it responded to improperly parked scooters) and “operations and fairness,” which included plenty of components comparable to how the corporate responds to complaints and its efforts to position scooters in “fairness areas” exterior the middle metropolis, together with southeast and much north Seattle.
In line with the town’s scooter knowledge dashboard, Wheels scored notably poorly in comparison with different firms, together with Spin, at offering equitable entry to its scooters.
Veo, which operates like a scooter however is classed as a bicycle, poses what SDOT spokesman Ethan Bergerson calls “attention-grabbing questions” for the town. In contrast to conventional scooters, Veo units are authorized on sidewalks; as a result of they aren’t categorised as scooters, additionally they occupy one in all simply three potential bikeshare permits, which may restrict the variety of shared e-bikes allowed on metropolis streets sooner or later, if different firms determine they need to enter the Seattle market.
“The bike/scooter share panorama could be very dynamic and has shifted significantly because the bike share program started in 2017,” Bergerson stated, and now consists of “extra firms providing units which mix among the options of bikes and among the options of scooters. … If this market development continues, it might make sense to contemplate the best way to modify our permits to mirror the altering know-how and trade tendencies.”
2. The Seattle Public Library is ending its contract with the Downtown Emergency Service Heart, which for greater than 5 years has supplied a part-time “neighborhood useful resource specialist” to attach patrons to meals, social providers, and shelter, and hiring its personal social service specialists.
The brand new hires embrace an assistant managing librarian on the downtown department to supervise the work; a brand new social providers librarian who will “work with data employees to take care of present data and contacts, coordinate the Bus Ticket program, and act as a hyperlink between our common data providers and our Neighborhood Useful resource Specialists,” based on library spokeswoman Elisa Murray; and two new in-house neighborhood useful resource specialists, together with one who will concentrate on outreach to youth and younger folks.
“Whereas this new mannequin doesn’t essentially present patrons extra time with on-site employees, we do suppose we are able to keep extra partnerships with this mannequin, which we hope will result in elevated alternatives for patrons to entry the supportive providers they want,” Murray stated.
For years, libraries (together with Seattle’s) have debated whether or not, and to what extent, library staffers must be chargeable for connecting patrons not simply to library supplies, however to social providers and sources exterior the library’s direct management. By hiring employees to supervise a few of this work, SPL is making a extra direct funding within the the idea that libraries can and will do each.
3. A brand new unbiased expenditure group representing marijuana retailers, referred to as Folks for Authorized Hashish, simply filed with the Seattle Ethics and Elections Fee, reporting $16,000 in debt to the polling agency EMC Analysis. The group’s intent: To struggle off potential laws, first reported by David Hyde at KUOW, that will impose a further gross sales tax on weed gross sales in Seattle. If the laws, at the moment being floated by the United Meals and Business Staff Native 21, passes, the group may suggest a referendum to overturn the legislation.
In line with a presentation first posted on KUOW, which PubliCola obtained independently, the UFCW’s still-nascent proposal would impose a “hashish fairness tax” of 25 cents a gram on flower; $2.00 per half-gram of high-potency concentrates; and a penny per milligram of THC in all the pieces else. The cash would fund a paid “hashish fairness fee”; “workforce coaching” for hashish staff; and a “hashish fairness fund” that will “prioritize the wants of these most impacted by the Struggle on Medicine,” which locked up hundreds of thousands of Black and brown Individuals for possessing and consuming weed.
Whole taxes on hashish in Seattle add as much as greater than 47 p.c, between the 37 state excise tax on hashish gross sales and a mixed state and native gross sales tax of greater than 10 p.c.
The laws, which has not been formally proposed, may additionally require marijuana retailers to “make religion effort” to rent at the very least half their staff from economically distressed ZIP codes, and mandate that 10 p.c of their hours go to workers who’ve been arrested or convicted of against the law associated to marijuana prior to now, or who’ve a member of the family with such an arrest or conviction.
“Within the midst of a public security disaster created by armed robberies of hashish companies, it’s disappointing that the Metropolis Council is contemplating advancing one more tax and unprecedented and unworkable human sources mandates on small companies,” Folks for Authorized Hashish spokesman Aaron Pickus stated. “Although the supporters of this proposal on the Metropolis Council haven’t but substantively engaged with authorized hashish companies, we stay up for sharing details about the realities of the trade and about how hashish revenues will likely be used for native programming statewide, together with in Seattle communities.”