If you’re a newspaper rack in Solvang, it might be time to clean yourself up.
The city’s about to crack down on cracked paint and collect overdue permit fees to keep sidewalk free speech alive and well.
At least one City Council member thought it might be best to just do away with the racks altogether.
“Why do you feel there’s a need to perpetuate these stands even being there?” Councilmember David Brown asked.
Yeah, why should magazines, advertising publications, and newspapers just be allowed on the street? It’s not like it’s a public space or anything. Oh wait. It is!
“A sidewalk is a public forum, and that is a space that has the most protections for free speech,” City Attorney Chelsea O’Sullivan said. “You can walk around on the sidewalk and say your piece. … We have to allow it, allow the speech to happen, but we can regulate it.”
But, Brown said, people can just go into a private business and pick one up.
Can they? Private businesses have the right to determine what kind of speech happens in their establishments—which means if they don’t like what your publication has to say, they can ban it—and who’s allowed to frequent their businesses—at least in some ways: “No shirt, no shoes, no service.”
But, Brown wondered, what about advertising publications?
“There’s free speech and then there’s marketing,” he said.
Someone needs to brush up on the First Amendment! Advertising is free speech, bud. Duh!
Folks in Guadalupe are practicing their free speech by asking the city’s government why it can’t keep them in the loop when it comes to the Royal Theater renovation plans.
This is the same project that the City Council wanted residents to pay for via bond measure. In a last-minute failed effort to get it on the ballot before the deadline, the city was chastised for not giving the public time to weigh in.
Now, City Attorney Philip Sinco is blaming a federal agency Guadalupe received a grant from for its latest last-minute shenanigans. City staff submitted theater redesign changes for its Economic Development Administration (EDA) grant before asking the City Council to approve it. Why? The deadline was too close, according to Sinco.
“The problem underlying all of this is the EDA,” he said. “That’s half the money we raised from grants … there’s great concern that if we don’t meet those deadlines, it could result in the loss of the project.”
But why can’t the city seem to identify the deadlines until it’s almost too late?
“I’m very disappointed, dismayed, and angry at how the Royal Theater has been managed and handled,” Guadalupe resident Melanie Backer told the council on Oct. 8. “Since January 2024, huge mistakes have been made, large community gaps—no communicating … until things are too late.”
Becker’s not wrong. She criticized the project’s manager for not doing a better job of sounding the alarm about funding and raising local dollars to help pay for the theater renovations funding gap. Project Manager Tom Brandeberry said he was using Facebook to make announcements about the project.
Sounds like a valiant outreach effort. Not.
Maybe he should try putting something in the public forum—the sidewalk.
The Canary is a sidewalk squawker. Send talking points to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Oct 17-27, 2024.