Median ban could hit vendors
Webber’s proposed measure criticized over possible impacts on homeless people, ‘New Mexican’ sellers
Aresolution sponsored by Mayor Alan Webber to ban standing on medians less than three feet wide could affect not just panhandlers but also vendors who sell copies of The New Mexican to Santa Fe commuters.
“The bill as written seems to eliminate our ability to continue our street vendor program,” New Mexican Publisher Patrick Dorsey wrote in a statement.
Although not a critical moneymaker for the paper, representatives said street sales have been a longtime tradition in the city, one some customers have enjoyed for years.
Circulation director Mike Reichard said the newspaper has been sold on street corners in town for more than 50 years, and some of the people who’ve hawked The New Mexican have become neighborhood institutions. The late Mary Russell, who sold the paper in the Casa Alegre neighborhood for at least a decade, was so well-liked that her median, near St. John the Baptist Catholic Church on Osage Avenue, was regularly covered with flowers months after her death in November.
Reichard said some people buy the paper from a street vendor every morning and say that’s the only way they want to read The New Mexican.
“It is no longer a material part of our business, but we still have up to 200 daily customers who only want to buy from ‘their vendor’ and help that person in some small way,” Dorsey wrote.
Webber said the measure is not an attempt to single out newspaper vendors or any other demographic, including people who panhandle.
“To even combine the issue of traffic safety and very narrow medians and very high trafficked streets with homelessness is a mistake; they’re not connected at all,” he said in an interview Tuesday.
Some of the people in the street vendor program rely on selling the paper to make money, Dorsey wrote, and would likely be panhandling otherwise.
“We would be very disappointed if the program was forced to end and the resulting negative consequences for our program participants who feel dignity and pride in providing a service to earn some income,” he wrote.
The resolution, which was introduced April 10 and is scheduled for a final vote May 29, would prohibit people from sitting or standing on any city median less than 36 inches wide. Webber said the resolution grew out of concerns from observing people standing on medians with their pets in busy roads, which he
described as “an accident waiting to happen.”
“Over time, we’ve grown to accept as acceptable something that is dangerous,” he said.
But safety may not be the only reason the city wants to limit access to medians. At a City Council Finance Committee budget hearing Tuesday, tourism director Randy Randall said one of his department’s goals for the upcoming fiscal year is to “support all efforts to minimize the impact of the homeless in our most visible tourism areas of the city.”
In an interview, Randall said having homeless people interact with visitors isn’t beneficial for the tourism industry, one of the city’s largest moneymakers. Although most visitors come from places where homeless people also have a presence, “they want to leave that behind when they go away.”
“If there’s something that could be done that would help keep them out of the historic district, we’d be there with support and some resources,” Randall said.
The city halted enforcement of a previous panhandling ordinance in 2018 over concerns about whether it was constitutional.
In 2020 it installed signs at 10 busy intersections encouraging people to give money to social service organizations instead of panhandlers.
Webber’s resolution follows an unsuccessful attempt by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham to introduce similar legislation during the 2024 legislative session. Jesse Guillén, a legislative liaison for Lujan Grisham, said Wednesday the governor was not involved in the city’s effort. He said he did not know whether the governor plans to bring back a similar bill at a special session in July focused on public safety, though Senate Majority Leader Peter Wirth said when she announced the special session last week panhandling was one of the potential topics being discussed.
Lujan Grisham’s proposal was met with opposition from civil liberties groups and advocates for the homeless, who questioned its constitutionality. A letter from the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico to Webber said while the ordinance makes no mention of specific groups, it is “obviously an attempt to curb panhandling within the City of Santa Fe” and suggests the organization would sue the city if it were to go into effect.
A memo from city staff regarding Webber’s bill states the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes New Mexico, upheld a similar ordinance in Utah that was challenged on First Amendment grounds.
Since that decision, the ACLU’s letter said, the 10th Circuit has struck down panhandling ordinances in Albuquerque and Oklahoma. Albuquerque has since introduced new anti-panhandling measures.
“We encourage the City of Santa Fe to decline to pass this legislation into law to avoid the significant financial burden of costly litigation,” the letter said.
According to recent estimates, there are several hundred homeless people in the city of Santa Fe, which has a population of about 90,000.
Webber said he is “very proud” of the work the city has done on homelessness in partnership with groups including the S3 Housing Initiative and the New Mexico Coalition to End Homelessness. He came under fire from some of those same groups Wednesday night during a public hearing on the bill.
Monet Silva, executive director of the New Mexico Coalition to End Homelessness, described the measure as “another attempt to criminalize homelessness.”
“The city of Santa Fe has done so much to address homelessness, and I really feel that this is a step backwards,” she said.
Erika Kidd, a program manager at Santa Fe Suites and a volunteer with the S3 Santa Fe Housing Initiative Community Volunteers, said some people at the suites panhandle for items food stamps don’t pay for. Making that illegal won’t change the fact they need money, she said.
Former District 1 City Council candidate Kathy Rivera spoke in support of the measure and passed out copies of a photo posted to a Facebook page that showed a man either passed out or asleep on a city median.
“It’s hard to defend keeping this as our status quo,” Rivera said.
It’s unclear which medians in the city would quality for people to stand on under the new resolution. At a previous City Council meeting, S3 volunteer Rachel Thompson brought a yardstick and asked if police were going to go around measuring all the medians.
Webber said he’s asked Public Works Director Regina Wheeler to look into the city’s geographic information system capabilities to produce a map that would identify medians that would would be covered by the proposal.
Webber said he spoke to city police Chief Paul Joye about the measure and the first thing police would do if they see someone in a median illegally would be to ask them to move to a safer place.
If cited, the infraction would be a petty misdemeanor handled in municipal court.
Webber pushed back on a question about whether the police department, which is short about 40 officers, would have the capacity to monitor people in medians.
“I think if it becomes a part of the city’s code, police will make it part of their enforcement regime,” he said.