At Wednesday night’s meeting, the Kenai City Council held a lengthy discussion to determine whether to remove a portion of the municipal code.
The ordinance (3414-2024) documents claim that the city has “broad prohibitions” against begging, loitering, and sleeping. However, the city does comply with modern law, but the ordinances could be applied in ways that don’t comply with modern law.
According to a memo from Kenai Police Chief Dave Ross, these code sections, if misapplied, could threaten individuals’ rights.
The Police Department has not issued any citations for these violations in recent history. So, while this ordinance is intended to eliminate certain sections of municipal code, this does not change the department’s ability to enforce state laws and any illegal conduct.
“These sections of code are not enforceable as they are. They are all problematic. Some of them could be changed to where they were enforceable if portions of them were gotten rid of and things added to them. And in our discussion, you know, we thought it would probably be better to, instead of speculating what we might need to change them to someday, that we just remove them from code at this point. And and then if we found a reason for them in the future, then we could come up with a appropriate ordinance at that time,” said Ross.
One of the claims is that the rules are “too broad” information-wise.
For instance, public sleeping is currently a hot topic in the 9th Circuit Federal Court of Appeals, but due to our current applicable federal decisions, prohibition in Kenai is not enforceable.
Because of this, Kenai City Attorney Scott Bloom says they would like to see the final verdict before changing the code.
City code also prohibits loitering and wandering aimlessly at night, but no definition of loitering is provided.
Ross worries that if they choose to crack down on loitering, many community members may not even know they’re in violation, which can lead to other problems.
“To loiter or wander aimlessly within the city streets, I mean, that’s problematic just in the way it’s written, you know, just wandering aimlessly among the city streets. We can’t just outlaw that. I mean, that’s probably half the citizens that go for a walk are wandering aimlessly. So if we wanted to address loitering or those things, then we need to adjust this ordinance to to fit. A standard that we could enforce, you know, that wasn’t just if the common citizen will look at the ordinance and say, yeah, am I violating it, then it’s not a not meeting a standard that the court would uphold,” said Ross.
“Beggaring” or asking for help is no longer a form of speech that can be prohibited alone. For it to be considered unlawful, beggars must be interfering with traffic or putting people in an unsafe situation.
For these reasons, Chief Ross believes it would be best to remove them from the code, and should problems arise later, re-enact them after they are re-written.
Overall, these codes could be enforced later, but only after some work to improve the rules has been updated.
“We had some laws on the books that we didn’t enforce relating to loitering, begging and curfews. And because we didn’t enforce them, we think they should be better written where we remove them from law. So we didn’t reenact anything. We just took them off the books because we think that there’s other laws that can be enforced essentially to accomplish the needs of the city. If the city desires to address those issues, such as loitering or have a curfew or address, you know, like panhandling, we have to do that in the future,” said Kenai City Attorney Scott Bloom.
After further discussions and a vote, the ordinance was enacted with 6 of the present members in favor.
