[MissoulaGov] Committee Update 9-30-09

[Jason Wiener]

Matt and Jon, thanks for wading in to the discussion. Bob, thanks for the forum.

I don't dispute that people who care about downtown have tried to provide for the indigent. I think the evidence is ample that they have, and also that the need is much greater than what they could be expected to provide. A small part of one city in Montana, and probably some surrounding states as well, is being left to care for people for whom the responsibility should be much more broadly shared. Further, other people, who don't have the same needs as the truly down and out, see our tolerance and solicitude as an opportunity to be taken advantage of. I am as angry as anyone about that, particularly because we sweep up one with the other when our reaction turns to enforcement.

We have not exhausted the constructive things we should do in order to ensure that the people being run off from public space are actually people who are there for no better reason than that they see us as marks to be taken advantage of. But I'll grant that something can be done to enhance the pedestrian interference ordinance so downtown businesses don't bear as disproportionate a burden as they do now.

We have a proposal I can support on its way to the floor on Monday night, however people tell me that Bob's amendment modifying the ban on sleeping or lying on sidewalks so that it only makes the activity illegal within 12 feet of the entrance to a building hollows out the revised ordinance so much that we might as well not be doing anything at all.

I'm not convinced. That might just be because I haven't heard an argument made yet that a comprehensive ban would actually fix it so people who avoid downtown because of their reaction to people sleeping and lying on the sidewalk would return to downtown. I suspect we would need to do much more than pass this ordinance to make that happen, and I doubt all of it would be constitutional.

Still, if I was an advocate for the ordinance proposed by the working group, I could easily see the committee's decision to replace a comprehensive ban with something less as a refusal to take my side on a question where I'm in the right. If I worked the long hours in sometimes tough market conditions that downtown business owners doubtless do, I'd want the city to do everything I said it should in order to make my success possible. And the city does do a great deal that's constructive for downtown, too much people who now oppose the ordinance have said.

I hear, loud and clear, the message that downtown is not a place where everyone feels welcome. I haven't yet heard an argument that what the working group proposed would downtown's image so much better that the inhumanity which would inevitably (even if it was infrequently) result would be worth the tradeoff. I also haven't yet heard an argument about how 24-foot exclusion zones around building entrances, which at least might mitigate the inhumanity of rousting people reduced to sleeping on sidewalks, would be so much less effective that it's not even worth attempting.

There's the burden of argument for shifting my vote, I suppose. I appreciate you reading my perspective.

J.

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Jason Wiener, Alderman, Ward One
1238 Jackson St.
Missoula, MT 59802
(406) 542-3232

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