Thursday morning, the Tampa City Council voted 6-0 (Council Chair Frank Reddick, a likely dissenter, being absent) to rescind a provision allowing low-income and homeless individuals to peddle newspapers on city sidewalks and medians.
Despite a controversial panhandling ban that passed in 2011, selling newspapers to passing or stopped cars was allowed to continue operating.
It was an all-out ban that was initially proposed then, but extensive public outcry led the council to tweak the measure to allow for people trying to make a living by selling the papers on Sunday.
But the advocacy group Homeless Helping Homeless sued the city on First Amendment grounds, claiming that barring everyone but newspaper sellers from medians and street corners was essentially restricting the allowable content of individual expression — kind of a constitutional no-no.
"In other words, you have to treat everyone the same," Councilwoman Yvonne "Yolie" Capin, who saw the measure as a way to avoid spending taxpayer dollars to fight a legal battle that would likely have been a losing one, told CL. "We rescinded it so it hopefully becomes a moot point with the lawsuit... We don't want to spend the taxpayers' dollars being sued, and that's the bottom line."
Contrasting the lengthy meetings over the issue four years ago, there was little controversy Thursday. One of the couple of people who did address the council on the issue was David Driscoll, an independent contractor for the paper.
"Because of an expense of litigation, you're going to put 100 people out of work that sell newspapers [on Sundays], that try to make some money for themselves," he said, according to a Times report.
Capin said she asked the city's legal department to look into a solution that would allow people to sell newspapers without violating the panhandling ban, but said she couldn't really talk about it further due to the ongoing litigation.
"At this point, I can't even talk about my goals," she said. "We're not saying we're throwing our hands up and saying that's it."
Instead of having no ban in place, Tampa will — at least for now — use Hillsborough County's panhandling ordinance, which restricts the practice in all forms.