You might not think of panhandling as free speech. A Charlottesville attorney does, and he has a Waynesboro ordinance banning panhandling in the city limits in his crosshairs.
Jeff Fogel has already won a settlement from the City of Charlottesville in a 2014 case involving a city ban on panhandling in parts of the Downtown Mall. A federal judge struck down the ordinance last year, and the city government ended up paying a $125,000 settlement to five homeless plaintiffs in the case.
“This litigation was not about homelessness but rather about the right of everyone in our community to exercise free speech,” said Fogel, who represented the plaintiffs in that case as cooperating attorney for the ACLU. “As the court found, it was ‘the City’s intention to discriminate against a particular type of speech (panhandling) and a particular kind of speaker (beggars).’ Fortunately, the First Amendment does not allow government to pick and choose the speech it will allow.”
The Waynesboro ordinance, enacted in 2014, prohibits anyone from approaching vehicles on city streets, medians, roadway shoulders and intersections “for the purpose of soliciting charitable or other contributions of any kind from the driver or occupant of a motor vehicle.”
Violations of the ordinance are classified as misdemeanors with fines in the place of jail time as punishment.
Cameron Clark, a Waynesboro resident who is the plaintiff in the local case, “is poor,” according to a court filing, “and reliant to a certain extent on begging to sustain himself.
“In the past, he has panhandled within the confines of the city of Waynesboro and wishes to continue to do so.”
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