Approximately 70 supporters of Occupy Long Beach lined up to speak at last night’s city council meeting. Photo by Dennis Dean
7:20am | If that headline sounds critical, it really isn’t meant to be. But as one observer stated as the three-hour Occupy Long Beach portion of Tuesday night’s city council meeting concluded with OLBers filing out after the council granted OLB nothing: “anticlimactic.”
The truth is, as anyone who has both followed the OLB saga and knows a thing or two about how the City of Long Beach works, OLB got all they were going to get on this night when Rae Gabelich’s motion that City Manager Pat West, Parks & Rec Director George Chapjian, and the Health and Police Departments compile a report “on the practices of other cities to accommodate the Occupy protestors, and a discussion of options the City may consider to provide a free-speech zone or other means to address the issue.” The only suspense was whether OLB was going to swallow it.
Despite some grumbling, they did.
They had pled their case for nearly three hours to a patient mayor and six councilmembers1, a case that orbited around their argument that the First Amendment grants OLB the right to remain in the park with shelter since (so the argument goes) it’s not camping but political speech.
City Attorney Robert Shannon wasn’t having any of it, pointing out that last week a Sacramento ordinance nearly identical to Long Beach’s anti-camping ordinance (for all you municode nerds, that 16.16.010(k)) was upheld as constitutional in federal court.
“[G]overnments may impose reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions on speech,” Shannon said, averring that anti-camping ordinances are considered a reasonable time restriction.
Shannon went on to say that the City “cannot create an exception [to the ordinance] for Occupy Long Beach [and not for everyone], because to do that it would cease to be content-neutral as applied. In order for the City to allow this semi-permanent encampment, it would have to amend the ordinance to eliminate the curfew.”
That, of course, is just what OLB wants. They — or at least most of them — will tell you that the curfew, the anti-camping provisions, the whole kit and caboodle should go, because it’s really all just a means by which the City hassles the homeless.
Police Chief Jim McDonnell spoke briefly, declaring his support for free speech, and saying that his officers have been permissive with the OLBers.
On the topic of police permissiveness, McDonnell made a curious claim: “We’ve allowed tents or shelters during the daytime on the grass area.” OLBers say that’s patently false, and I’ve certainly not seen any tents since the first couple of days of the Occupation, even when it rained. But if any OLBers reading this wants to take the chief at his word and erect a tent during the day, please drop me a line to let me know what happens.
As for what happens now, the aforesaid report is to be submitted to city council within two weeks, and the council doesn’t meet again until December 6.
After the meeting, the 70 or so OLBers gathered directly in front of council chambers and, after a bit of chanting, discussed what had just transpired. Some were satisfied with what they saw as progress, others discontent with what they saw as the lack of it.
One of the OLB speakers of the night, in very reasoned tones, warned the council that the situation “will get uglier and uglier” if they tried to postpone action. And to be sure, there are some within the movement that already have begun further agitations. (Look for a story on this within the next 24 hours.)
“This is what democracy looks like!” OLBers called-and-responsed at one point during the meeting. Councilmember Gerrie Schipske echoed those words: “I do agree that this is what democracy looks like. It’s kind of messy sometimes, and it’s not always very attractive … but this is exactly what democracy is about.”
How much the City’s view of democracy — and the actions it takes based on that view — looks like the visions of democracy held dear by the Occupy movement may make all the difference in how the OLB story continues to unfold.
1 Garcia and Lowenthal were slated to be absent; DeLong absented himself (for reasons unknown to the Long Beach Post) before the OLB agenda item was taken up.
Click here to view our policies covering the Long Beach city council.