Court panel sides with food-sharing program
FORT LAUDERDALE — In the latest court skirmish over a food sharing mission for the homeless, a federal appeals court has found that the group’s weekly events to feed the homeless are protected under the Constitution.
Fort Lauderdale tried to shut down the program, claiming it violates a decades-old city rule that requires city permission for social service food sharing events in all Fort Lauderdale parks. The rule allows officials to charge up to $6,000 for the permitting process, but the court found that it violates Food Not Bombs’ First Amendment Rights to expressive conduct.
The group grew out of an anti-nuclear protest in New England and now has chapters across the United States. It promotes the shift of funding away from the military to address hunger, poverty and other social challenges.
Food Not Bombs has hosted weekly food sharing events in Fort Lauderdale’s downtown Stranahan Park for 15 years. The group has spent at least seven of those years battling the city in court.
The Fort Lauderdale chapter’s weekly feeding events at Stranahan Park generated opposition downtown, where a growing homeless population had led to tensions with businesses owners and visitors. The city passed a law imposing restrictive regulations on outdoor food distribution operations, as part of a suite of ordinances aimed at the homeless, such as limits on panhandling and sleeping on public property.
In the ruling, three judges determined that the city’s rule cannot lawfully qualify as a “valid regulation” of Food Not Bombs’ protected conduct due to its “utterly standardless permission requirement.”
“Under the terms of the rule, a city official may deny a request for permission to hold an expressive food sharing event in the park because he disagrees with the demonstration’s message, because he doesn’t feel like completing the necessary paperwork, because he has a practice of rejecting all applications submitted on Tuesdays, or for no reason at all,” Senior U.S. Circuit Judge Stanley Marcus wrote in the ruling.
The same rule was called into question back when Arnold Abbott, a lifelong activist who fought to feed the homeless on Fort Lauderdale’s public beach, obtained a state-court injuction against the rule on the grounds it violated Florida’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Abbott, who died in 2019, was not affiliated with Food Not Bombs.
Abbott began feeding the homeless on Fort Lauderdale’s beach in 1991, although it was illegal to provide such a social service on the beach. Years later, when the city demanded that he stop, he refused, saying he and his corps of volunteers had a right to feed the homeless so they could eat on the beach like anyone else.
Tuesday’s ruling explains that the city enacted the rule to address problems associated with large group food sharing events in public parks, such as trash buildup, food safety issues and crowds. But the rule is “not narrowly tailored to the city’s interest in park maintenance,” Marcus wrote in the ruling.
Fort Lauderdale City Attorney Alain E. Boileau said the city is “certainly disappointed” in the ruling. “We are continuing to analyze the Court’s lengthy opinion, and will determine the City’s next steps, in consultation with the City Commission,” he said.