by Jeremy Morrison, Inweekly
Pensacola began its experiment with electric scooters almost a year ago, and it’s been a bit of a bumpy road.
“I’ll be the first one to say we’ve had challenges, but I think we are working through them,” Mayor Grover Robinson said Monday during his weekly press conference.
With the trial period for the e-scooters coming to an end – the contract with Bird scooters expires in July, while one with Veo runs through August – Mayor Robinson is asking the Pensacola City Council to consider extending the city’s pilot program to continue addressing concerns with the scooters, such as the issue of parking.
“This is why you have a pilot [program]; the pilot is to figure out what you can do and to shape stuff as you go through,” Robinson said.
The mayor explained that the main issue the city is having with the e-scooters is that people leave them on sidewalks or otherwise inappropriately parked. To address this issue, the city is installing parking corrals for the scooters in the downtown area this week.
“I would like to think we could give them another two months and go through the summer here and see if people can comply,” Mayor Robinson said, outlining his request to the council this week.
While the mayor is requesting that the council allow time for the public to become familiarized with the corral concept, Councilwoman Sherri Myers is contending that the e-scooter program should be scrapped. Robinson said Monday that he thinks the scooters should be viewed through the lens of easing downtown parking concerns – giving people an alternative to driving and parking vehicles downtown – and, thus, continued effort should be put into addressing any concerns with the program.
“When people talk about the issues with the scooters, I continue to tell them, how are you going to handle parking?” Robinson said.
Tippin Park Re-Do
The city canceled a public input meeting regarding improvements to the Tippin Park Community Center slated for this past weekend, apparently due to outside influence muddying the process. Mayor Robinson said Monday that the neighborhood meeting had been canceled due to concerns from nearby residents over “some projections of what some people were saying it ought to be.”
“The neighborhood meetings that we have are there for the neighborhoods to tell us what they want,” Robinson said, stressing that the city was looking to the surrounding community to inform its plans for the center. “The community center really needs to be designed and programmed to do what the community wants.”
Apparently, word has circulated in the neighborhoods near the Tippin center, in some instances via a flyer, that one potential use of the community center could be to provide food to the homeless community.
“They talked about doing homeless feeding there,” Mayor Robinson said, alluding to the flyer and clarifying that the city does not provide food to the homeless community at such facilities. “We don’t do that at any of our community centers.”
The mayor said that a date for a re-scheduled input meeting has yet to be determined. He said the city intends to start the conversation fresh when the meeting is rescheduled.
“We’re gonna circle back around and pick a date, and we want to come back to the community,” he said. “It’s a blank slate; they should tell us what they want.”