Who Ordered the Licata Sunrise? Panhandling Ordinance Comes Up for Vote

Tim Burgess

This Wednesday morning, the City Council's Public Safety and Education Committee votes on Tim Burgess's aggressive panhandling ordinance. Burgess has just put the revised formulation up for review on his blog (pdf). "The changes," he says, "clear up misunderstandings, lend more clarity, and require an annual assessment of the effectiveness of the ordinance from the City Attorney and Chief of Police."

The ordinance makes aggressive panhandling a civil infraction, with unpaid fines and missed court hearings leading to a criminal charge. (Writing in his newsletter, the Council's Nick Licata describes the current situation: "Aggressive panhandlers are regularly convicted under Seattle's current law. Nearly 80 percent of those charged under the existing law against aggressive panhandling in the last ten years have received a conviction of some kind; more than half of the defendants plead guilty to aggressive panhandling.")

The changes to Burgess's ordinace have resulted in a granularity that seems likely to hinder successful prosecution. For instance, panhandling is not allowed if someone is using an ATM, which sounds like common sense. But then using an ATM is defined as:

...immediately before or after conducting a transaction at an ATM or parking pay station, is handling in plain view any money, bank card, parking receipt, check or other document related to the transaction.

(Defense: "We'll need to see a subsection defining "immediately," "in plain view"...well, and all the other words you used, too. Are there photographs of the plaintiff holding their receipt?")

Nick Licata

In detailing his position, Licata adopts a Socratic pose, asking: "Is it aggressive behavior or is it panhandling that concerns us?" His evidence suggests that the current law is being used vigorously, and that certain downtown residents and merchants are fed up with panhandling in general, despite it being a legal activity. (See Real Change's "Panhandlers Talk Back.") Therefore, says Licata:

I'm proposing two "Sunrise Amendments" to the legislation that say that the legislation will be enacted once funding has been made available and applied to 1) deploying additional police officers for beat patrols (without redeploying our existing bike patrols) and 2) improving outreach services to homeless people as identified in the HSD report to the City Council.

The ordinance is likely to make it onto the books--downtown has become such a Wild West that not many are going to vote against what sounds like a good old-fashioned street-cleaning. But that said, I'm most heartened by the provision that the ordinance will be revisited in a year to see if it's accomplished anything.