San Diego City Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera and a labor union leader are criticizing Amazon for using a public park in the city’s Crown Point neighborhood as a distribution center.
Elo-Rivera says Amazon must immediately stop the practice in Crown Point Park and elsewhere in San Diego, stressing that the activity took place without a permit and without Amazon compensating the city in any way.
He said it’s unfair to families, yoga instructors, youth sports leagues, civic groups and other organizations that must wade through red tape and bureaucracy to secure permits for organized activities in city parks.
But he doesn’t want Amazon to seek a permit, contending the company needs to find its own private distribution sites instead of trying to lower its costs by using city parks.
“Amazon does not get to turn San Diego’s public parks and public right-of-way into its private distribution network,” Elo-Rivera said at a Wednesday news conference in Crown Point Park. “Parks are for the people, not for profit.”
Amazon admitted to using the park as a distribution site, but a company spokesperson characterized it as an isolated incident that won’t happen again.
“Due to a miscommunication, Crown Point Shores was used as a package transfer site,” said the spokesperson, Austin Stowe. “We’ve since corrected this error and added safeguards to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”
Elo-Rivera said he doubted that was true.
“Nobody accidentally runs a distribution operation out of a park,” he said. “It wasn’t a mistake. Amazon made a calculation that nobody would notice and that if somebody did, nobody would do anything about it. They got caught, and they called it an accident.”
Elo-Rivera said Amazon’s use of the park is also unfair to other local businesses, especially small ones.
“They’ve spent years trying to compete with Amazon on an already uneven playing field, and then Amazon takes public land to rig the game even more,” he said. “A trillion-dollar corporation apparently decided it could set up a delivery operation on public property for free, and that’s unacceptable.”
The use of the park by Amazon — which has long drawn criticism for its labor practices, including recently for its classification of many delivery drivers as independent contractors — was also criticized by Todd Walter, president of local 135 of the United Food and Commercial Workers.
“If Amazon is using public parking as a makeshift distribution site, it’s avoiding the cost of securing legitimate space — a cost that every responsible employer, union and non-union, has to pay,” Walters said at the news conference.
He called the use of the park a public subsidy for a company that doesn’t need one or deserve one.
Another critic is Chris Walker, co-founder of an activities group called the Winyl Club that has sometimes struggled to secure city permits for parks and other public venues.
“If these spaces are for the public, then why aren’t there more accessible ways for the public to use them?” Walker asked at the news conference.
The criticism came just as Amazon said Wednesday it plans to expand its delivery by drone into suburban areas in hundreds of U.S. cities.
Stowe, the Amazon spokesperson, said the company launched on-foot delivery in San Diego in recent weeks, requiring new distribution sites where workers on foot can load up push carts with goods from trucks. He blamed the use of the park on a “miscommunication” and said Amazon often uses local delivery service operators.
The goal of the on-foot deliveries is to reduce noise and traffic congestion caused by double-parked Amazon vans — and the potential crashes that can cause.
Elo-Rivera said he likes that idea, but not if it affects city parks.
“I support the concept of not blocking streets, but I don’t support using public space for distribution centers,” he said.
Elo-Rivera said he would support a crackdown on Amazon vehicles double parking, contending that’s evidence the company’s business model relies on making San Diego’s streets more dangerous.
He said City Attorney Heather Ferbert is exploring whether Amazon can be fined for using the park and what steps can be taken to ensure no other parks are used.
“They think it’s their space to use until somebody makes them stop,” he said.