Speaker 8: Agenda item five Council Bill 118712 relating to the for hire industry, including wheelchair accessible taxis and for higher industry insurance. Amending Sections 6.310.260.300.500. And repealing section 6.310.335 of the Seattle Municipal Code. The committee recommends the Council bill pass.
Speaker 0: Thank you very much. So this counts, Bill 118712 just by way of background, certainly pertains to the taxi for hire TNC industry. And just by way of background, in July of 2014, you may recall that we passed an ordinance that regulated transportation network companies or TNC like Uber and Lyft for the very first time. And the ordinance made changes to existing regulations that governed taxis and flat rate cabs. Today, by the way, there's 90 new city licenses that have been issued from 2015 to 2016, and 110 city only medallions will be issued in 2018. But the bottom line, as a results to this particular ordinance, is we looked at the insurance requirements and we wanted to make sure we had a larger pool of providers available for all of the drivers. We realize it becomes an economic hardship for drivers being able to compete in this robust industry. And so we certainly wanted to take steps to make sure that we are listening to the drivers and supporting our drivers. So what we did was during a provisional period, we reduced the rating to what's called a B rating. And after the provisional period, it was reset to B plus. But we've gotten feedback based on the research from the city that we had no experience to where adverse consequences from lowering the rating to during the provisional period to a B. And we believe that is still strong, great coverage for all of the consumers and allows us to get the largest pool of providers. And so again, this is coming from our fleet folks and we believe this is a good policy, a good policy recommendation. And the other thing it does is it takes up the what the wheelchair accessible taxis from 45 to 50. And the reason why there is this increase of five and five only is because as someone sort of had testified that there was a sort of a pilot, if you will, and the county had had added five. There were five sort of out there that had county only license. And we had they gone to 50, we'd gotten to 45. So the director of Fleet, in fact, decided that it was prudent to issue five new world wheelchair accessible licenses for the city. So allow those a conversion of county only to have dual licenses. Now this does not this does not in any way affect the continuing work that we will do this year, which is looking at whether dual licenses make sense to look at, again, the sort of the world of the for hire and taxi and what industry there still remains a lot of work to do. So this is more of a, if you will, an administrative sort of shore up to make sure that we're in consistent with the county. But again, we may revisit many of the issues that we left sort of on the table on July 14. So that's what this this this ordinance does. And it passed out of full committee. And we asked, as you support it, are there any questions? I'm not going to quiz you on any of what I just said, but. Okay. Please call the role on the passage of the bill.
Speaker 1: O'Brien sworn I. Burgess Gonzalez I. Johnson whereas Herbold I. President Harrell all right. Eight in favor and unopposed.
Speaker 0: Thank you. The bill passes and chair will sign it. Please read the agenda. Item number six.
AN ORDINANCE relating to the for-hire industry, including wheelchair accessible taxis and for-hire industry insurance; amending Sections 6.310.260, 6.310.300, and 6.310.500 and repealing Section 6.310.335 of the Seattle Municipal Code.