Taxi drivers in many cities across the country including Salt Lake City and Seattle are required to speak English. That requirement may soon come to taxi drivers navigating Idaho’s capitol city. Tuesday Boise’s city council hears from the public and will likely vote on an ordinance that would require them to be proficient in English.
If you want to be a taxi driver in Boise you have to take a test. It’s on Boise geography. Dawn Portugais in the city clerk’s office administers these tests. She hands me a dry erase marker and a laminated aerial map.
Dawn Portugais “Read the questions and then you’ll mark it with the marker.”
The test starts off pretty easy.
Adam Cotterell “Circle Boise Town Square Mall.”
Dawn Portugais “Correct.”
But the questions get harder.
Adam Cotterell: “The shortest route from St. Al’s to Boise city hall.”
I’m just a few questions into this section of the test.
Adam Cotterell “Curtis.”
Dawn Portugais: “No.”
Adam Cotterell “No?”
Dawn Portugais laughs.
Maybe I’m not cut out to be a taxi driver. But I do have an advantage over some applicants. I speak English. The city doesn’t keep track but Portugais says more than half of the people who take the test aren’t native English speakers. Potugais says she’s failed people because they couldn’t speak English.
Dawn Portugais “I can’t understand them, they can’t understand the test. So they fail the test so I can’t give them their license. Either that or I tell them to come back with an interpreter.”
Portugais says it’s common for people to bring interpreters with them to take the test. But interpreters won’t be allowed if Boise passes its ordinance to require English proficiency for taxi drivers:
Craig Croner “We don’t want to be punitive about this. We just want to have some basic English two way communication skills where people have a good experience.”
Craig Croner is administrative services manager at Boise’s city hall. He helped write the new ordinance. He says taxi passenger complaints prompted it…. Like one from a woman who took a late night cab ride with some friends. In her e-mail, she describes telling the driver to go one way. The driver goes a different route despite her continued protests. The woman writes that the driver was from Sudan and had only been in Boise a few weeks.
Croner says his office has been careful in writing this ordinance because of the possible effect on one group – refugees. Many of Boise’s refugees drive cabs.
Craig Croner “We want to make sure that we don’t impact that community too heavily with over regulation. We want to make sure they have a good experience to the city of Boise and they can have a viable opportunity to have a piece of the American dream.”
Croner says the city doesn’t track how many of its taxis are driven by refugees, but he suspects it’s a high percentage.
Taxi driver Adile is one of them. He doesn’t like Boise’s proposed English requirement.
Adile “I think this… discrimination. I think like that.”
Adile sits in his cab in front of the Boise airport. He’s been in Boise for six years and driving a cab for five. He says when he started it was difficult to find work. Driving was all he could get. Now he says it’s hard for everyone to find jobs and people are starting to resent refugees.
Adile “Yeah lots of people now asking, you speak English, say you Muslim. One day I say you Muslim, I say yes I am Muslim. He say f*** you and go take next car.”
Adile says most of the taxi drivers he waits in line with at the airport are refugees. Many of them tell me they support an English requirement. Adile says it’s important to be able to communicate with passengers but he’s worried about his writing skills. The test for taxi drivers is written. Under the new ordinance test administrators must read the questions out loud if someone asks for that. Christina Bruce-Bennion with the resettlement organization Agency for New Americans says that’s helpful. But she’s concerned that the standard for what is good English is arbitrary.
Christina Bruce Bennion “If there’s not sort of an understanding for the different ways someone might phrase something or might respond to a question I think it could affect the outcome. So I hope there would be some kind of training for the individual who ends up with that responsibility.”
Dawn Portugais from the city clerk’s office does have that responsibility. She says she knows if she can understand someone or not.
Boise looked to several cities including Portland, Seattle and Salt Lake for guidance on writing an English proficiency requirement for taxi drivers. Salt Lake City for example does require English proficiency but the city leaves the testing to cab companies. That’s not the case in Seattle where that city’s test is administrated by trained English as second language teachers from a community college. A spokesman for Seattle says before the city began this, reports about drivers not being able to speak English were common. Now those complaints are virtually nonexistent.
Boise’s city council hears from the public on its new taxi ordinance tonight. That meeting begins at 6:00 in City Hall.