Following backlash over Austin City Council's efforts to require drivers of ride-hailing companies to be fingerprinted as part of their background checks, Mayor Steve Adler said Tuesday he believes the requirement should be voluntary. On Dec. 18, City Council approved changes to the ordinance regulating ride-hailing companies, such as Uber and Lyft.  The ordinance change created regulations similar to those followed by taxi companies and set benchmarks for 99 percent of each company's drivers to be fingerprinted by February 2017 but did not stipulate whether driver fingerprinting would be mandatory or optional. "What we did in December was incomplete," Adler said during a Jan. 19 press conference. "It had no enforcement mechanism." Adler said the discussion on regulations for ride-hailing services and similar companies is ongoing, and he believes the city and private sector can come to a mutually beneficial agreement. "I think we have two competing goals in this city that should not be competing with one another," he said. "I think it's important we have ride-sharing companies operating at scale in this city. ... At the same time there's been a concern about safety, [...] and I have never been comfortable with the prospect that we have to choose between those two competing goals." A coalition of area organizations opposed to the ride-hailing company ordinance changes reports gathering nearly 65,000 signatures as part of a petition found at ridesharingworks.com. for City Council to "adopt the common sense ridesharing rules [...] or put the issue up for a public vote." Adler said city staff on Tuesday received a signed petition. Adler said he is in favor of a third-party vendor developing a fingerprinting background check or security badge feature for ride-hailing services and other peer-to-peer companies but did not indicate what role the city would play in development of that feature.