Add comment on:

Shafting Non-Shoppers: Expanding the Destructive Downtown Ordinances
Robert Norse
In a disguised attack on the entire non-commercial street scene, tomorrow's afternoon City Council meeting will rubberstamp restricting still further the very limited public space currently allowed the community downtown. Under the guise of health concerns, reducing congestion, and preventing a "trip-and-fall" hazard (none of which is documented), the reactionary new laws will essentially force street performers, vendors, homeless people, local residents, and tourists to compete with each other for the small amount of "legal" spaces allowed for sitting, vending, performing, sparechanging, or political organizing. The hope is clearly to reduce "congestion" by eliminating what remains of the street counterculture. Another brilliant salvo from the bowels of the City Manager's office. It's another direct attack on the right to publicly assemble or simply use community space without paying a fee to merchants.

Guidelines for commenting on news articles:

Thanks for contributing to Indybay's open publishing newswire. You may use any format for your response article, from traditional academic discourse to subjective personal account. Please keep it on topic and concise. And please read our editorial policy, privacy, and legal statements before continuing. Or go back to the article.

Comment Title (required) Author (required) E-mail Display email? URL TEXT/HTML (required) Tip: use spaces between paragraphs. Is Text HTML? For plain text, URLs will be converted to clickable links. You may also use <a href="url">link</a> in plain text articles (other tags will be ignored unless you select "HTML"). When selecting "HTML", you must provide <p></p> and <br /> tags for paragraphs and line breaks.

Number Of Uploads 0 1 Maximum size of each uploaded file 480MB; maximum total size of all uploaded files 560MB; 6 hours maximum uploading time. Accepted File Types: 3G2, 3GP, AMR, AVI, F4V, FLV, GIF, JPG, M3U, M4A, M4V, MOV, MP3, MP4, MPG, OGA, OGG, OGV, PDF, PLS, PNG, RAM, RM, TORRENT, WAV, WMA, WMV For playability of media files on mobile devices, upload videos as MP4s with H.264 encoding. For audio, upload MP3s.

CAPTCHA Anti-spam questions (Required) What is 10 minus 1?

You must preview your post before publishing.