Focus is not on begging, apparently

Palmerston North has a new plan for tackling begging, but not by dealing with begging and intimidation directly.

Instead, the city could make sure people have the freedom to enjoy public spaces.

Plans to write an ‘‘amenity’’ bylaw to control beggars making a nuisance of themselves in Palmerston North’s central business district have been narrowly supported by city councillors.

The bylaw would not outlaw begging, but aims to give the council some clout.

But while eight councillors, such as Susan Baty, said the council needed to have the guts to do something about problem beggars, six others, including community development committee chairwoman Aleisha Rutherford, voted against it.

The council has been grappling with what to do about begging since 2011, when it rejected the idea of a bylaw.

It has tried a Give Wisely campaign to educate the public not to encourage begging, proposed then rejected using ‘‘day hosts’’ to discourage giving, and tried the social work approach through the MASH Trust to help beggars get off the streets.

In March, in light of a hard core of people continuing to beg, it revived the idea of a bylaw and asked staff to investigate.

Legal consultant Michael Riordan said staff could not comply with the council instruction to ‘‘address issues of intimidatory behaviour related to begging through an existing or new bylaw’’.

That was because intimidation was already a criminal matter.

Instead, it had to redefine the problem as ‘‘the adverse effects on public safety and convenience and the amenity values of public places resulting from nuisance behaviour’’.

Riordan said the council had to be careful not to breach people’s rights to freedom of expression and freedom from discrimination.

But the risks of breaching the Bill of Rights Act would be lower if the council could show it was justified in trying to take reasonable steps to control the behaviour of people who interfered with the public’s right to use public spaces.

The proposed bylaw would provide a process for investigating complaints before issuing any notices to individuals to tell them to stop what they were doing, and there would be a right to object.

Only if behaviour continued after a notice was given out could the matter become a criminal one.

Rutherford said the council had spent a vast amount of time and money on the begging issue, and the bylaw recommendation still was not going to work.

She said she did not want to put council staff in the potentially unsafe situation of having to tell beggars to move along.

‘‘They would need mental health training, de-escalation training and security training.’’

Cr Lorna Johnson said trying to legislate against a certain group of citizens was fundamentally wrong, and could be legally challenged.

She said there was a risk it would just move the problems outside the CBD or to the suburbs.

Cr Lew Findlay said the problem was not begging, it was having people in the community whose mental health needs were not being dealt with.

Baty said a bylaw would be ‘‘a tool that would give us some clout’’.

Cr Karen Naylor said the bylaw seemed a reasonable balance.

‘‘People would still have the freedom to beg if they were not imposing a nuisance on others.’’