The City of Wilmington has no plans – nor the authority – to regulate a new ride sharing service that has driven into the area, according to city officials.

With Thursday’s blog announcement from San Francisco-based Uber that its uberX ride sharing was expanding to Wilmington and five other North Carolina cities as of noon Thursday, city officials were asked if Wilmington would follow numerous other U.S. cities in trying to put the brakes on the app-driven service.

Dylan Lee, a spokesman for the city, said he checked around with the Wilmington Police Department and other relevant city departments and said that no one he spoke to knew anything about Uber besides the fact that the City of Wilmington does not have the ability to regulate the app.

Uber, launched in 2009 as an alternative to taxi service, is built around mobile phones and freelance drivers who use their own cars to transport customers. The company’s tagline is “request, ride and pay via your mobile phone,” and its users download an app that lets them find a ride. Uber bills itself as a “safe, affordable and reliable ride at the touch of a button,” according to Thursday’s blog post, but some locales where it has been operating don’t quite see it that way.

Seattle, for instance, finally forged a three-way agreement with ride-share companies Uber, Lyft and Sidecar, the taxi industry and the City of Seattle after a year of protests on both sides and heated debate. The new agreement will let the app-based transportation services keep operating without any limit on how many drivers can be on the city streets at any one time, according to a recent report in GeekWire. 

That’s a policy reversal: In March of this year, the city approved a measure which limited the number of active drivers per company, a decision that sparked protests that the city was limiting innovation, and forced officials to reconsider, the story stated.

In California, the University of California system is considering prohibiting its employees from using Uber and other app-based transportation services on business trips, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported Friday. And California Public Utilities Commission is warning ridesharing companies that they could be shut down if their drivers continue to operate at airports in the state without permission, according to a story in the San Jose Mercury News.

A class-action lawsuit against Uber is looming in Boston, filed by a labor lawyer who claims that the company is exploiting its drivers, according to a story in the Boston Globe.

Still, the company continues to expand, adding Durham, Chapel Hill, Fayetteville, Greensboro, Wilmington and Winston-Salem to its network Thursday. It was already operating in Charlotte and Raleigh.

“One more transportation option for North Carolina is good for riders, good for drivers and good for cities,” the blog post stated.

Since Uber is still in testing phase in its new communities, the blog continued, the app may not work perfectly at first and users may have to hit “refresh” in order to request a ride.

Intern Samantha Santana contributed to this story