Taxi firms attack report

Salt Lake City's three taxicab companies are fighting back.

Just a month after an independent consultant told the City Council that the city's cab system needs a radical overhaul, the cab companies are countering with allegations that the consultant's report is incomplete and cut and pasted from previous reports done for other cities.

The report from Ray Mundy of the Tennessee Transportation & Logistics Foundation recommended that the city take the "radical" approach of disbanding its current cab license system and move to a system of franchising cab companies.

Mundy, speaking via telephone from his office at the University of Missouri St. Louis, said Friday it wouldn't be proper if he responded until after the June 1 public comment period expired. On June 7 the City Council plans to hold a public hearing on Mundy's findings, and Mundy said he would comment then. Any decision by the council would come after that hearing.

Mundy did say Friday that opposition to his recommendations was expected.

"In the full range of alternatives this is considered the more radical solution," Mundy said of his proposal to disband cab licensing and move to franchising.

Many cab companies across the United States consider cab licenses to be a property right and have sued to prevent cities from revoking that property right.

"I would assume that they would aggressively want to protect what they consider a vested property right," Mundy said.

Property rights laws vary from state to state, and Mundy has said that various attorneys have offered different opinions about whether cab licenses would be considered a property right under Utah law.

The law firm of Winder & Haslam provided a response for the city's three cab companies — Yellow Cab, Ute Cab and City Cab — Friday.

In the lengthy response to Mundy's study, for which the City Council paid $42,000, attorney Donald Winder alleged part of the report was cut and pasted from other studies.

"What the city received instead was essentially a cut-and-paste job derived from studies TTLF did for other cities," Winder said.

However, proof of that cut and pasting was unclear.

Winder cited page 51 of Mundy's report as stating that Salt Lake City has "17 taxi companies." While Salt Lake City has only three cab companies, Winder said the number 17 came from a study Mundy did for Dallas in 2002.

That claim appears to be unsubstantiated. A copy of Mundy's report, found at www.slcgov.com, states on page 51 that Salt Lake City has "three taxi companies," not 17.