San Diego city and union leaders are pushing back against Amazon after the company used Crown Point Shores as a package transfer site for its new on-foot delivery service. Officials say Amazon did not get proper permission or pay for permits to operate in the public park.<\/p>\n
Amazon said the use of Crown Point Shores resulted from a miscommunication and that it has since corrected the problem. But Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera questioned how the company could have mistakenly turned a public park into a distribution site.<\/p>\n
\u201cDid they not notice the grass here, the picnic tables the families the playground, no one accidentally runs a distribution center out of a park,\u201d said Elo-Rivera.<\/p>\n
Elo-Rivera called on Amazon to follow the same rules as anyone else using public property for business. \u201cGet your packages out of our parks, get your distribution off public property, follow the rule Amazon needs to get the hell out of our parks.\u201d<\/p>\n
He also argued that the park should remain available for residents.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt should be where kids play and families gather not free warehouse space for Amazon,\u201d said Elo-Rivera.<\/p>\n
Amazon recently launched an on-foot delivery service in San Diego that involves setting up a base camp in a neighborhood and sending workers door to door with packages. The idea is to reduce noise and traffic.<\/p>\n
DJ and event coordinator Chris Walker said he knows how much work and expense can go into renting public space for business purposes.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow much it\u2019s going to cost to put it on how much is going be sold in tickets there\u2019s so many tedious things that you wouldn\u2019t think to make an event worth it,” said Walker.<\/p>\n
For Walker, the idea that Amazon could use a public space without permission was frustrating. \u201cI was disappointed like wow how did they get away with this.\u201d<\/p>\n
City officials and union leaders also raised concerns about the potential effect on local and small businesses that compete with Amazon.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey spent years trying to compete with amazon on an already uneven playing field and then Amazon uses public land to rig the game even more,\u201d said Elo-Rivera.<\/p>\n
Amazon said it spoke with the city before launching the new program but would not comment on whether it attempted to obtain the proper permits. In a statement to NBC 7, a spokesperson said:<\/p>\n
\u201cDue to a miscommunication, Crown Point Shores was used as a package transfer site. We’ve since corrected this error and added safeguards to ensure it doesn’t happen again. We remain committed to working closely with local officials as we continue rolling out this program to better serve San Diego customers.\u201d<\/p>\n
This story was originally reported for broadcast by NBC San Diego. AI tools helped convert the story to a digital article, and an NBC San Diego journalist edited the article for publication.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"San Diego city and union leaders are pushing back against Amazon after the company used Crown Point Shores…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":440853,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[8487,74,76,75],"class_list":["post-440852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-diego","tag-amazon","tag-san-diego","tag-san-diego-headlines","tag-san-diego-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=440852"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440852\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/440853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=440852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=440852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=440852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}