The Summit County Council, meeting today, will consider approving a six-month Temporary Zoning Ordinance, in order to set up a regulatory structure for a new generation of personal transportation.
Meeting at the Richins Services Building, the Council at about 5:00 pm. will consider a TZO for "Shared Active Transportation."
County Manager Tom Fisher said they will include items like e-scooters and dockless bikes, which the county expects they're going to see pretty soon.
"Salt Lake City did a pretty good job of working with the dockless scooter companies as they came in. In order to have some business licensing around that, regulation, understanding of the tax implications, those types of things. We’d like to be ready for that as those technologies start to show up in Summit County. We’ve seen some of those technologies that are implementing in Salt Lake City come up to the valley for some special events. We expect that they are going to want to be here at some point.”
He said they want to encourage this type of transportation, though they also want to be ready for it.
"These transportation options are things that can probably help our transportation system. Not saying all of them will or will not but we don’t want to discourage new ideas from coming in.” Fisher explains that the TZO would not block them from coming to Summit County, “It doesn’t prohibit them at all. It just asks them to be working with us on how it’s implemented if they want to within the next six months as we develop that final ordinance.”
We asked him what might happen if the county didn't set up the TZO.
"We’d miss an opportunity to really figure out with these companies how this technology can help us and how we can track that. How we can work with them to make it the best situation for our residents and for our tourists.”