Aamer Madhani

USA TODAY

CHICAGO — Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Thursday was pushing for a last-minute compromise before Chicago’s city council votes on an ordinance that would bolster regulation of drivers with the ride-hailing apps Uber and Lyft, who have threatened to cease doing business in the nation’s third-largest city if it passes.

The ordinance would require drivers using the ride-hailing app to obtain chauffeur’s licenses and undergo the same background check as the city’s taxi drivers. The city council’s Transportation Committee is scheduled to vote Friday on the ordinance.

If the committee approves it, the hot-button ordinance would be considered by the entire body as early as next week.

The faceoff comes weeks after Uber and Lyft ended operations in Austin after voters there rejected a proposal by the companies to self-regulate their drivers and mandated that drivers undergo fingerprint background checks and have emblems on their cars.

Passage of an ordinance in Chicago, which Emanuel has fought vigorously to scale back, comes at an inflection point in the long-running national debate about whether Uber and Lyft drivers should face similar regulations as taxi drivers. In addition to the scheduled vote in Chicago, debate over stiffening regulation for ride-share drivers is also brewing in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Miami and Seattle.

Uber and Lyft launched a public relations blitz on social media and with ads on local television and in newspapers ahead of Friday’s vote, calling on Chicagoans to side with them in the debate.

The companies argue that they already conduct background checks on their drivers and that the ordinance would make the business unworkable in the Chicago market. Because most drivers work fewer than 10 hours per week, Uber officials argue that many of their drivers would be dissuaded from getting the chauffeur’s license and drop out of the service.

The companies also claim they are providing more rides — and jobs — to predominantly African-American communities on the city’s South and West sides than the taxi industry.

“The new rules would require ride-sharing drivers to jump through costly and time-consuming hoops without additional benefits for the community,” Uber and Lyft wrote in a newspaper advertisement this week urging the council to reject the ordinance.

Emanuel, whose brother, Hollywood agent Ari Emanuel, is an investor in Uber, floated reworking the ordinance so that only drivers that work 30 or more hours per week would be required to obtain a chauffer’s license, according to council members.

Aides to the mayor met with members of the city council’s transportation committee and Uber and Lyft officials on Thursday to discuss the proposed ordinance. The mayor’s office said in a statement that it was hopeful that a compromise could still be forged.

Some backers of the ordinance bristled against the mayor’s last-minute push to rework it.

“For me, it’s a non-starter, it’s ridiculous,” said Alderman John Arena, a council member who backs the ordinance, told USA TODAY. “We’d be right back to zero compliance. Their own data says these are mostly part-time drivers — these are people driving 12 hours per week, 15 hours per week.”

Uber and Lyft officials both warned city council last month that passage of the ordinance would likely result in the company pulling up stakes in Chicago.

"We cannot operate under a regulatory framework like this,” Lyft vice president Josephm Okpaku said. “If you can’t get part-time, casual drivers on board, the model fails . . . If you shut off the critical mass of drivers, the whole system starts to crumble."

Uber’s Chicago general manager, Marco McCottry said that "ride-sharing as we know it would no longer exist in Chicago."

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Alderman Anthony Beale, the author of the ordinance, said it is necessary to level the playing field for the taxi industry and ensure the safety of passengers.

Beale, who says his ordinance is backed by 34 of the council’s 50 aldermen, wants ride-hailing drivers to pay a $115 fee, take a one-day course and undergo the same background check based on FBI fingerprinting that is used to vet city taxi drivers to obtain a restricted chauffeur’s license.

“This ordinance recognizes that there is no reason that different companies providing the same service should operate under different rules,” Beale said. “The public safety safeguards I’ve proposed are important to protect people and these protections will not cut into ride-sharing’s lucrative business here in our city.”

Uber officials counter that the FBI background system includes arrests that may have never led to charges or convictions.

Former attorney general Eric Holder wrote a letter to Beale echoing Uber’s concern that “fingerprint-based background checks for non-law enforcement purposes can have a discriminatory impact on communities of color.”

“With nearly 50 percent of African-American men and 44 percent of Latino men arrested by age 23 nationwide, the practice of denying work based on law enforcement records with incomplete and inaccurate information disproportionately disadvantages people who have been arrested,” wrote Holder, who works for a law firm that advises Uber. “The impact becomes even more acute when looking at communities such as Chicago, where 80 percent of working age African-American men have criminal records and nearly half of young black men are unemployed.”

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Arena dismissed the threat by Uber and Lyft to leave the Chicago market as a hollow threat.

“For the safety of our constituencies, we got to start having a stiffer spine,” Arena said. “We need to tell corporations that they need to provide public safety provisions, reasonable regulation. ”

Follow USA TODAY Chicago correspondent Aamer Madhani on Twitter: @AamerISmad