NEWTON COUNTY— The Social Circle City Council has sent their attorney back to the drawing board to tweak a proposed public assembly ordinance governing public property that council members saw for the first time Monday.
The proposed ordinance defines public property as “any public street, road, alley, sidewalk, trail, … right of way, or square” in the city, “any public recreational property, public park, public parking lot or parking facility, public greenspace, and any other similar outdoor property owned or controlled by the City … that is usually accessible to the public; and/or any building or structure owned or controlled by the City or one of its associated boards, commissions, or authorities.”
Consideration of a public assembly ordinance, to bolster bare-bones regulations now in the city code, is part of the city’s ongoing response to plans by U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) to house as many as 8,500 people in a 1-million-square-foot warehouse at East Hightower Trial and Social Circle Parkway.
The privately built and marketed warehouse, only recently completed, was purchased earlier this month by the U.S. government, along with similar purchases nationwide, for transformation into detention centers for immigrants marked by ICE for deportation to their home countries.
The plan for the Social Circle warehouse has attracted the attention of progressive activists, a small number of whom recently held a protest on land near the warehouse as federal officials were touring the facility prior to the federal government’s purchase of the building.
As plans for the warehouse have moved forward, the city has been fielding numerous calls from people and organizations interested in public demonstrations of opposition to the facility.
The city itself has expressed serious reservations about the plan, noting that the city’s infrastructure – particularly water, sewer, and emergency services – is incapable of supporting a facility that could nearly triple the town’s population.
A few months prior to the first news that Social Circle was under consideration for an ICE detention facility -- contained in a Washington Post report published shortly before Christmas -- the city had been considering some adjustment to its public assembly regulations, aimed chiefly at more tightly controlling organizations engaged in selling doughnuts or hosting fundraising drives at a downtown stoplight.
News of the ICE facility, and the attendant interest in protests and demonstrations by people opposed to the initiative, prompted city officials to ask the city’s counsel to look at the city’s public assembly regulations and to recommend changes.
According to Social Circle City Manager Eric Taylor, the city has recently received inquiries from groups and individuals interested in holding events ranging from canvassing neighborhoods with information about the ICE detention center to hosting prayer vigils.
“We thought it was time to fast-track what we had started last fall,” Taylor said Monday, noting that in addition to merchandise sales and donation drives at stoplights, the city’s existing ordinance concerns itself primarily with things like regulating parades and issuing film permits.
Monday’s council review of a proposed public assembly ordinance came less than a week after City Attorney Jay Crowley pointed the council, at its regularly scheduled Feb. 17 meeting, to an existing public assembly ordinance in the northwest Georgia city of Rome as a possible model. Copies of the Rome ordinance were distributed to the council following that meeting.
Crowley’s proposed public assembly ordinance for Social Circle, which he said Monday is designed not to unduly restrict public assemblies, but to “keep everybody safe,” tracks the Rome ordinance, with some exceptions.
As just one example of a difference between the Rome ordinance and the Social Circle proposal, in Rome, the issuance of required permits for public assemblies is handled by the police chief; the ordinance proposed for Social Circle would vest that power in the city manager or the manager’s designee.
Like the proposed Social Circle ordinance, the Rome ordinance lays out conduct that is prohibited during public assemblies, including a regulation that “(n)o person at an assembly or event shall carry or possess any weapon.” Councilman Adam Conavay expressed some concern that such a regulation, even though it carves out an exception for state “constitutional carry” law, might unduly infringe on Second Amendment rights.
“I personally don’t think they (firearms) have any place there (at demonstrations),” Conavay said, while also suggesting that the proposed ordinance language “might be a Second Amendment issue.”
Taylor had numerous concerns about the proposed ordinance, including regulations regarding prohibited conduct that lay out the specifics of what materials can be used for signs – “cloth, vinyl, paper or flexible cardboard material” – and the allowable thickness of such material – “no greater than one-quarter inch.”
The regulations also delineate that balloons can be filled only with “air, oxygen or helium,” an attempt to keep materials such as “water, paint, or any other liquid, solid or gas” out of demonstrations.
“I don’t want (the city) to be the ‘sign police’ for something like this,” Taylor said, wondering aloud whether police officers would be required to carry tape measures, or to ask participants what their ballons were filled with, to ensure compliance with the ordinance.
Among its technical requirements, the proposed ordinance mandates that permits be obtained, regardless of the number of people attending, for any assembly that partially or completely blocks a public sidewalk, a public street or other right of way, that blocks entry or exit at a public facility, or that uses sound amplification. Processing a permit would carry a $10 non-refundable fee under terms of the proposed ordinance.
Additionally, the proposed ordinance, which runs a little more than 11 pages, requires that any person or group that wants to have an assembly of 10 or more people must obtain an assembly permit. However, some council discussion Monday hinted that the “10 or more” requirement could be eased to apply to assemblies of 25 or more people.
Under the proposed ordinance, applications for assembly permits must be filed with the city no less than four days before the planned event.
Interestingly, though, the ordinance includes a “spontaneous event” exception to the permit requirement, applicable only to the small downtown Friendship Park, that covers “(s)pontaneous assemblies or events that are occasioned by news or public affairs coming in to public knowledge less than four days prior to such an event.” In those instances, the proposed ordinance would require event organizers to “… file an application as soon as practical.”
Monday’s discussion left Councilman Tyson Jackson wondering how the city would react if a protest was staged without a permit, which led to a suggestion that such a situation could be handled as if the event were a spontaneous assembly, with a permit required after the fact. Beyond that, Crowley suggested that any group that consistently held protests without first getting a permit could provide the city with cause to take action to ensure future compliance with the ordinance.
As a benchmark for the council, Taylor pointed out Monday that the only protest worthy of note thus far in connection with the ICE detention center, arranged the night before federal officials visited the site, and held on the roadside near the warehouse, “may not have qualified under this (proposed) ordinance.”
One reason, Taylor said, is that organizers did not notify city officials until just hours before the protest that they planned to stage the event. Additionally, Taylor noted, the protest may have attracted as many as 25 people.
The council appears to be in no rush to get a public assembly ordinance on the books. Its next discussion of a tweaked version of the ordinance is set for the council’s non-voting work session, set for 6:30 p.m. March 5. Absent any move for a special called meeting, the first opportunity for a council vote would come at its March 17 meeting.
Taylor, who said at the Feb. 17 meeting, “I think time is of the essence with this (revamped public assembly ordinance), based on some of the phone calls we’ve been getting,” indicated Monday that he is not particularly concerned about the council’s timeline, because there is “nothing imminent” in terms of protests proposed for the city’s public spaces.
