When you fall on hard times, it’s always tempting to look for someone other than yourself – your financial adviser, your banker, the brother-in-law who told you to put all your money in GM stock – to blame the fall on. Now that Bend’s downtown is hurting, the search for scapegoats is on. The latest candidate: panhandlers.
The Bend City Council has asked City Attorney Mary Winters to look into legal ways that the city can deal with the perceived panhandling problem. This came in response to a complaint from a local merchant who thought people standing out on the sidewalk asking for money could be hurting business.
Some councilors agreed with her, including Tom Greene, who was quoted as saying, “I’ve had a lot of people say it makes them uncomfortable to go downtown.”
Skeptical as we always are of any claim that begins with “I’ve heard a lot of people say,” we can believe that some people might be made uncomfortable by the presence of a panhandler. But we don’t believe panhandlers are numerous enough or aggressive enough to be making an appreciable difference in downtown foot traffic.
And we don’t believe they’re a “problem” that the government of Bend – which presently is standing on the edge of the financial abyss with one foot on a banana peel – should be wasting time, energy and money on.
The attempt to address the panhandler “problem” is the latest in a series of efforts by the city to sanitize Bend – or at least the downtown part of it, which seems to be the only business district that councilors worry about. (Panhandlers have been plying their trade unmolested on the north, east and south sides for years.)
Early this month the council passed an ordinance making it a Class B misdemeanor to ride a skateboard downtown; perpetrators of this heinous crime can be fined $250 plus court costs. Before that, local merchants and city officials worked themselves into a sweat over the insidious menace of graffiti.
It’s time for city councilors and local businesspersons to face the unpleasant truth: If downtown shops and restaurants are running in the red, it isn’t because of graffiti or skateboards or guys on the street with cardboard signs – it’s because the economy sucks, and passing city ordinances won’t do anything to change that.
Councilors and business leaders might also pause to consider that if you aggressively promote growth, you’re going to get the unpleasant aspects – including panhandlers – that go with it. You can’t have a city of 80,000 and expect it to look and feel like a quaint little village of 20,000. The legal experts say it will be tough, if not impossible, to write an anti-panhandling ordinance that would hold up in court. Such ordinances in Portland, Springfield and Medford have all been struck down on constitutional grounds.
Trying to craft an acceptable law – much less defending it against the inevitable legal challenge that would ensue – just isn’t worth the time, money and effort. The council should tell City Attorney Winters to forget about it and give this idea THE BOOT.
This article appears in Apr 30 – May 6, 2009.
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The solution to the panhandler problem is quite simple. If everyone stays out of the downtown area there won’t be any panhandlers!
I can completely understand Bend politicians’ temptation to regulate panhandling. Also to make downtown quainter and more visitor-friendly. How about just some good old-fashioned hassling by the cops?
You would rather hide them away than help or admit there is a BIG problem in this lovely town?? Lame…
This is America and if those human beings, people with feelings, families, down on their luck are put in a position where they have to beg for money for food and shelter, then by God let them. They have a right to eat and live just like all of the Gucci wearing jet setters who moved to this town. This is not Nazi Germany and they are not taken off to the concentration camps by the Gestapo, not in America?
The people who are feeling uncomfortable with these people may want to take a good look at the idiots they voted into office the past eight years and realize they as in we are just as much victims as these human beings who have to beg to survive. The tragedy is that we are supposedly living in one of the most civilized nations in the world? YEAH RIGHT. We lack in social services, medical care for every human being living in our country and yet were robbed blindly by a Bush regime that destroyed America for years to come. It is the Hitler Youth elite who want these panhandlers off of their streets of gold.
Our nation is under siege by corporate america who conned us into a belief it is ok to use tax dollars to bail out the already greedy and screw over the increasing needy.
Neo Cons want to scream about socialism and the democrats wanting tax dollars to go to medical and social services, education and the betterment to our future, however say nothing about the socialism to large corporations into the Trillions?
Where are the Gucci wearers when we need a center for these human beings? Off to Paris and London to buy shoes and jewelry.