Lodi May Outlaw Solicitors: City Considering Ordinance to Restrict Panhandling
By Jeff Hood, The Record, Stockton, Calif.
Jan. 2–LODI — Panhandlers and other solicitors in Lodi could face arrest if they won’t take no for an answer.
The City Council is scheduled Wednesday to consider an ordinance that would make aggressive soliciting illegal and outlaw all soliciting near automated teller machines, at bus stops and intersections, and in public parking lots after dark.
The ordinance is similar to ones already in force in Stockton and Manteca. Downtown Lodi representatives, from business owners to workers and residents, have complained to the City Council in recent months about panhandlers who use foul language and berate pedestrians who won’t give them money.
“They’ve got to do something,” said Clay Sayler, a Sacramento Street barber who is vice president of the Downtown Lodi Business Partnership, a group that organizes events to draw visitors downtown. “They need a new law. I hope they put some teeth into it. We need help down here.”
City Attorney Steve Schwabauer said he has heard of several instances where people have felt threatened by solicitors. Lodi police say they need a tool such as a city ordinance that gives them an effective way of dealing with complaints. Violations would be misdemeanors.
“We don’t typically come up with ordinances because we feel like it,” Schwabauer said. “It’s because there’s been a number of incidents.”
Lodi police Sgt. Tod Patterson said residents and businesses also complain about tactics of paid signature gatherers who typically station themselves outside businesses along Kettleman Lane and Lower Sacramento Road.
Patterson said he has responded at least two dozen times in the past eight months to complaints at the businesses. Many of the solicitors are homeless people hired by a nonprofit group from Sacramento, he said.
“We’re just trying to have a safe, positive environment for people when they go out to shop, and these people are following them around and hounding them,” Patterson said. “They’re unshaven and unkempt, and one I spoke to had a warrant for his arrest and a meth pipe in his pocket.”
The Lodi ban as proposed also would result in the end of the Lodi Fire Department’s annual Fill the Boot fundraiser for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. Firefighters holding rubber boots solicit donations from motorists at intersections, a tactic that would be prohibited under the proposed ordinance.
Schwabauer said the ordinance could be amended to allow exceptions for permitted fundraisers, or the intersection ban could be removed if that’s the City Council’s desire.
Vice Mayor JoAnne Mounce said she does not want the Fill the Boot drive to suffer from the proposed ordinance.
Manteca enacted restrictions on soliciting in 2002, mainly as a safety measure, because panhandlers were stationing themselves at busy intersections.
Many other cities in California and throughout the United States have passed similar laws. Bans that prohibit all soliciting have been ruled unconstitutional, but a federal appeals court in 2000 upheld an Indianapolis ordinance that outlaws many of the restrictions in Lodi’s proposed ordinance.
Last month, Richmond, Va., proposed a ban on all soliciting in the city’s central business district, but after a lawsuit threat by the American Civil Liberties Union, the city delayed a vote on the ordinance and pared back restrictions that are up for a vote Monday.
Contact Lodi Bureau Chief Jeff Hood at (209) 367-7427 or jhood@recordnet.com.
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Copyright (c) 2007, The Record, Stockton, Calif.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
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