Until about six months ago, Santa Cruz Police took bikes that were deemed abandoned or stolen and gave them to organizations like the Bike Church. Steve Schnaar, a Bike Church member, found that police recently decided to instead entrust The Bike Dojo, a downtown business, with the distributions—partly a cost-saving measure according to the police department.
Before the city of Santa Cruz changed up its bike distribution program, which provides bicycles to kids, Tawn Kennedy wished someone would have talked to him about it.
“There wasn’t any formal or informal communication,” Kennedy, director of Greenways to School, says. “It was only after the fact that we found out.”
Until about six months ago, Santa Cruz Police took bikes that were deemed abandoned or stolen and gave them to organizations like the Bike Church, Greenways to School and Barrios Unidos, who in turn gave them to kids in need of new rides. In exchange, kids often did volunteer work.
After a few months with no bikes forthcoming, Steve Schnaar, a Bike Church member, started making public records requests and asking around. He found that police had decided to instead entrust The Bike Dojo, a downtown business, with the distributions—partly a cost-saving measure according to the police department.
In an email, police chief Rick Martinez told Schnaar it took the nonprofits too long to prepare for bike deliveries. “Storage of bicycles, staff time for delivery, along with the cost of delivering and disposing of metal has been a significant drain on city’s limited resources,” Martinez wrote to Schnaar in June.
As part of the new distributions, Martinez said the Bike Dojo works to register and license the bikes—something he accused the Bike Church of not doing enough. His email to Schnaar, which was obtained by the Weekly, even accused the Bike Church of “supporting bike thieves” because so many bikes ended up unregistered and back in police hands.
Schnaar says the Bike Church didn’t have any agreement with the city to keep track of that information. “We used to provide serial numbers, and they stopped asking us for it,” Schnaar says. “We could have started providing it again.” Martinez is on vacation and could not be reached for comment.
Emails show too that Santa Cruz vice mayor Hilary Bryant had vouched for the Bike Dojo as a valuable community business, a point she confirmed with the Weekly. It’s worth noting because Hillary Bryant’s husband Dave Shuman’s business Cruzin Pedicabs partners with the cycling gym. Shuman’s pedicabs are parked in the Dojo garage, and Cruzin recommends the Dojo for safety checks. Bryant says her role in the change was “limited.”
“Nobody’s profiting from this,” Bryant says of the city’s new partnership. “[The nonprofits] want to get bikes in the hands of children, which is the same thing Project B.I.K.E. wants to do.”
