[MissoulaGov] Committee Update 9-30-09

[Derek Goldman]

The businesses have nothing to complain about: Bob's amendment is probably not even really a compromise at all, as I suspect there are few, if ANY, stretches of downtown sidewalk that span 24 feet or more between doorways? So, its probably still, in effect, a total ban. 
Now that the homeless, vendors and street musicians are taken care of, BID can get on with the business of banning bicyclists, dogs, and other undesirables from the sidewalks...


 
 
 



From: JWiener at ci.missoula.mt.us
To: missoulagov at cmslists.com
Date: Thu, 1 Oct 2009 16:03:27 -0600
Subject: Re: [MissoulaGov] Committee Update 9-30-09
















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.

 



*********

Jason Wiener, Alderman, Ward One

1238 Jackson St.

Missoula, MT 59802

(406) 542-3232





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