A local service provider tasked with overseeing the maintenance and operation of the electric scooters on the New Mexico State University campus is claiming the company, Spin, is not fulfilling their agreement.

The representative of the company, who prefers to remain anonymous, said they have invested in a warehouse in Las Cruces and were contracted by Spin to be the local service provider for the electric scooters introduced last week on campus.

Due to unresolved issues between the companies, the scooters are being held at the warehouse until two unfulfilled invoices are paid off by Spin and the two sides agree on a contract that enables the contractor to do their job adequately.

The representative said the scooters arrived earlier than expected last week but with chaos ensuing. He claimed the representatives from Spin, who arrived to oversee the launch of the scooters, did not display thorough knowledge in scooter assembly.

He also said the Spin employee left Las Cruces before a formal contract was agreed upon by both parties. According to the representative, there was a verbal agreement involving worker pay, but now Spin is suggesting a much lower rate, claiming that they are trying to get a feel for the market in the region.

The Round Up reached out to a Spin spokeswoman, who also asked to remain unnamed, and she said that Spin had sent over a contract and verbally agreed upon a set rate per scooter per day.

The service provider claimed that the verbal rate was set at $50, but when asked about the verbal rate, the spokeswoman said she would need to check on that despite the fact that she had credible knowledge of the specific situation outside the dollar amount that was allegedly agreed upon.

She continued on to say he had agreed upon this rate and then all of a sudden, he said he needed to double the rate of each scooter per day, which was a surprise to their operations team. The negotiations were ongoing and were supposed to take place but never did while a Spin representative was in the Las Cruces area, according to the spokeswoman.

Because of the recent spike in the popularity of electric scooters, the representative acknowledged that Spin, along with similar companies such as Bird, Lime, and Skip are all in an arms race to secure the contracts of college campuses and municipalities.

The representative went on to question the legitimacy of the safety of the scooters, citing that he and his staff were given only a small briefing on how to fix possible issues that could arise with the scooters. He claimed the briefing to be a display of unsafe ways to fix the scooters and credited him and his staff’s previously-developed expertise as to how they were going to be able to fix the mechanical problems.

Spin also never asked for driver’s licenses of the employees the contractor hired to pick up and drop off the scooters daily, according to the contractor.

When asked about this issue, the Spin spokeswoman pointed to the company’s mechanisms that users can use to report problems and their internal safety team and reassured the safety of those that chose the ride the scooters.

So what is it going to take for NMSU’s campus to get the scooters back?

The spokeswoman declined to answer the question.

Updates to this story will be made once available.