Homeless Broward residents challenge laws
Citizens going to court regarding Fort Lauderdale’s anti-panhandling legislation
FORT LAUDERDALE — Mike Messina and Bernard McDonald, who are lifelong Broward County residents and have been homeless at various points in their lives, are challenging Fort Lauderdale’s anti-panhandling laws. They say the measures are an unconstitutional restriction of free speech.
One of Fort Lauderdale’s ordinances prohibits anyone from requesting donations in all public parks, city parking lots, transportation centers, government buildings and near sidewalk dining areas. The other ordinance the group is fighting prohibits asking for donations or offering items for sale to people in cars along certain roads, and along all city roads if the person is holding a sign, the Florida Justice Institute said in a news release.
Messina, 54, worked steadily in construction and was able to support himself for years. But a series of chronic health problems ended his career, and he hasn’t been able to find full-time employment. He’s been able to afford to survive by panhandling a few times a week, but says he is routinely harassed by cops who threaten to arrest him.
McDonald, a homeless and disabled laborer, challenged the same laws in Pompano Beach last year, alleging his right to free speech was violated when a deputy arrested him.
In August 2018, he was begging for money at Federal Highway and Sample Road, holding a cardboard sign that read, “Homeless, please help me if you can.” The Sheriff ’s Office arrested him for violating the city’s rules on panhandling. The charge was “street solicitation,” according to county records.
He was run out of Pompano and traveled to Fort Lauderdale, where he says he is harassed by cops.
His lawsuit pits two competing interests against each other: his right to free speech against the city’s goal to ensure public safety. Cases like Bernard McDonald’s have grown
increasingly common across the United States.
The same nonprofit public interest law firm and attorneys who assisted McDonald then filed the suit against Fort Lauderdale on Monday, seeking an immediate declaration that the law violates the First Amendment.
Pompano Beach repealed and revised a large portion of its ordinance against panhandling, “for the better,” said Ray Taseff, lead attorney with the Florida Justice Institute, the nonprofit firm that filed the suit.
“These laws have been enforced predominantly against poor and homeless people who were peacefully requesting donations,” Taseff said. “One of our efforts is to challenge them, not only to protect all of our civil rights and liberties, but also perhaps give governments pause to consider how the laws single out panhandling for differential treatment.”
Those who violate Fort Lauderdale’s rules can spend up to 60 days in jail or be fined $500, or both. In the past two years, over 100 people have been arrested or cited for violating the ordinances — nearly all of them homeless people requesting donations, the group said.
Fort Lauderdale’s laws only apply to panhandlers requesting donations, so anyone else could walk the streets asking for something that isn’t related to money, the group said.
The laws target poor and homeless people, Taseff said. That’s why you’re not seeing other groups get busted for street fundraisers, such as high school football teams holding out a football helmet for donations or firefighters passing around a boot, he said.
Mayor Dean Trantalis said the laws apply to those groups too, and that Fort Lauderdale hasn’t been strictly enforcing the ordinances.
“Lawsuits such as this are not really helping homeless people to find a path out of homelessness,” he said. “The city of Fort Lauderdale has been stellar in its efforts to work with homeless people, finding them shelter, finding them a way out of homelessness. If they were truly interested in helping those who are most destitute, they wouldn’t be looking for ways to enable panhandling which does nothing to help the homeless.”
Fort Lauderdale, home base for Broward County’s 2,000 or so homeless, has staged a series of crackdowns over the years to combat a problem that just won’t go away. In 2014, the city restricted the feeding of homeless people in public, then cited the late Arnold
Abbott, an elderly preacher who’d been feeding homeless people at the beach for years.
Abbott’s attorney challenged the city ordinances on constitutional grounds. Fort Lauderdale stopped enforcing them, in part due to the scathing publicity.
Then in 2017, Fort Lauderdale filed a complaint with the state health department after a rat was spotted running through a homeless encampment at the cityowned Stranahan Park.
When the state declared the park unsanitary, city officials insisted it had to be closed right away. Without warning, front-end loaders rolled in and hauled away the belongings of homeless people who weren’t there to collect their things.
The homeless eventually returned, setting up another makeshift tent city in front of the Broward Main Library, just south of Broward Boulevard near Andrews Avenue.
That encampment was dismantled in November 2018 and the homeless were relocated to hotels and apartments in a joint partnership between the county, the city, the business community and nonprofits.