Hear that huge sigh of relief among cookie-sellers, campaigners, protesters and others wanting to exercise their free speech and sugar-peddling rights over at the swell outdoor digs of the county courthouse?
Soon, they’ll no longer be scofflaws when they stake out their awnings on those public premises: Tuesday, the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors voted to chuck the ordinance it passed in 2012 to rid the courthouse lawn of a sprawling Occupy Eureka encampment that the city said threatened the health and safety of the community, in particular folks with business inside the courthouse.
Ordinance 2488 prohibits people from camping on the courthouse grounds, storing personal stuff there, setting up camping gear, securing anything to county property (including signs), littering, damaging county property including the plants, obstructing the flow of pedestrians and having animals on the loose (not counting service animals). It specifically prohibits erecting any building or structure, whether permanent or temporary, including an awning, windbreak and, of course, tent. (An earlier version, Ordinance 2477, was stricter, banning assembly between 9:30 p.m. to 6:30 a.m., and not allowing the use of tables.)
The ordinance went too far in some instances, and in others it merely repeated laws already on the books, critics said. Its chief critic, the Human Rights Commission, has spent the past year and some reviewing the ordinance and hammering the board to repeal it.
Nezzie Wade, vice chair of the commission, says the board acted wisely.
“There was no need for an ordinance, and the human rights commission rightly established that the problems that were there could have been handled by communication, education and accommodation,” Wade says.
Actually, the campaigners and cookie-sellers probably don’t know they’ve been breaking the law. Wade says law enforcement has not been enforcing the ordinance. And that, she says, has cast a “false view on the controversy,” as Girl Scouts, and campaigners including Virginia Bass, have propped awnings over their tables.
County staff now has to write up a new ordinance repealing the old one, and a policy statement outlining the existing laws covering county concerns about courthouse grounds usage.
This article appears in Carving Space.
I wonder if the vote was unanimous?
Can we please stop referring to the ordinances as responses to Occupy Eureka’s camping?
The response to the camp was using no-camping laws to send officers to remove tents and everything and everybody. Each Supervisor received an email about no-camping signs and then an email about the “movement against the Occupy Eureka camp.” The first public discussion took place two months later.
The lawn was fenced 4 months before the first ordinance passed in March 2012. Pushed to the plaza area, there were three attempts to provide a shelter for information tables. Everyone was handcuffed and detained while one was removed. The last attempt was taken at 11:30 pm on Dec 17 by a group of armed people in uniforms who didn’t feel the need to explain their actions.
Occupy Eureka had maintained a 24-hour vigil with nothing more than umbrellas for shelter for three months when the first ordinance passed. On stormy nights, I took refuge next to the Fifth Street entrance. The citations and arrests for camping at that point involved the homeless sleeping on the breezway. One night an officer told me nothing would happen if they would just “go down there with the protest.”
Instead of getting a restraining order, or using the County abatement procedure, the County used the no-camping laws to clear not only the tents but everyone and everything. In 2011 there was an existing Supreme Court case that hinted camping might be a form of expressive speech. At the appellate level it has since been decided that a camping display is expressive speech, but being in the tents is not. With that line drawn, only those in the tents would have been subject to arrest and the taking of unoccupied tents and signs would have been unconstitutional.