Beggars don't need mayor's approval in Ill. city

BELLEVILLE -- Panhandlers in the southwestern Illinois city of Belleville will no longer be required to get the mayor's written permission before asking for spare change.

The Belleville City Council has passed a new ordinance easing the restrictions on beggars. In an 11-1 vote on Monday night, the council in the city of 41,000 exchanged its ordinance calling for mayoral signoffs on begging for one allowing panhandling under tight restrictions, thinking a less-broad law would better survive legal challenges.

Many communities across the county have been grappling lately with what to do with the beggars and the local laws meant to discourage them, if not stop them all together as a staggering U.S. economy leaves many down on their luck and short on cash.

In Belleville, the new measure allows beggars to ask for cash unless it's after dark or they're in groups, at public events or near banks and automatic teller machines. The practice also is banned in the parking lots of businesses, schools, public housing complexes and medical buildings.

The ordinance doesn't apply to nonprofits or other donation-seeking charitable groups, including Salvation Army bell-ringers at Christmastime.

Violations of the ordinance call for possible fines of $75 to $250, though police Chief Bill Clay admits collecting any such fines from the downtrodden were unlikely.

"It's not something where we're going to make a bonanza in cash off of a bunch of poor people. That's not gonna happen," Clay said Tuesday. "What it is is a way to balance the community's interest with peaceful speech of the panhandler but give the officers something they can enforce -- and something we feel comfortable about withstanding court scrutiny."

The new ordinance was at the insistence of Clay who said to his knowledge, no beggars had bothered to get the mayor's written permission or got hauled off for panhandling. He said beggars were often just shooed away.

With an assistant city attorney's help, Clay said he helped craft the new ordinance to comply with a 2000 ruling by the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In that Indianapolis case, the three-judge appellate panel found that begging, while entitled to free-speech protections, can be narrowly restricted by time, place and manner.

Mayor Mark Eckert did not return telephone messages left Tuesday on his cell phone and at his office.

Monday's lone dissenting vote: Alderman Tim Carpenter, who on Tuesday considered the new measure flawed and said it would effectively tell panhandlers it's OK to beg. Carpenter endorsed sticking with the old ordinance that let the mayor decide who panhandles.

"Now it's not prohibited across the city, and I don't agree with that," he said.

Several communities are cracking down.

Council members in Missoula, Mont., on Monday night agreed to ban "aggressive" panhandling that includes overtly threatening tactics. In Salt Lake City, administrators are mulling an ordinance that would bar panhandling within 20 feet of sidewalk cafes, street vendors, bus stops and some other places, as well as on buses and trains and in public transit hubs.

Violence involving panhandling surfaced last month in Madison, Wis., where police say a beggar accepted $1 from a 50-year-old good Samaritan, then grabbed the rest of the donor's remaining $13 and punched him in the face.

Begging in Belleville didn't appear to be much of an issue Tuesday, when a 90-minute tour of the city's downtown and a shopping center on the city's west side turned up no panhandlers.

"I haven't really noticed a big problem with it," said downtown jeweler Chuck Blanquart, sympathetic to the plight of the beggars but cheering the city's efforts to keep them at bay. "It's an unfortunate thing that their lives are like they are. But something needs to be done."