Happens every year about this time: members of the union that represents Valley Regional Fire Authority firefighters volunteer their time to the Muscular Dystrophy Association’s Fill the Boot campaign to raise money and draw attention to a good cause.
And on Friday, firefighters will be on The Outlet Collection Mall parking lot, holding out fire boots and asking stopped motorists for donations.
But a recent tragedy far removed from Auburn has stoked local concern about this and like activity. On Sept. 9 Dennis Rodeman, a Michigan firefighter, was hit and killed by a vehicle as he participated in the Lansing Fire Department’s annual Fill the Boot charity event on behalf of the MDA.
On Monday the Auburn City Council changed regulations that relate to the conduct and operations of all charitable organizations operating inside City limits.
Out is language that had defined a charitable organization as “any other person having or purporting to have a charitable nature.”
“We recommend the change because it is very hard to regulate; we all have charitable natures at some level,” said Kevin Snyder, director of Community Development and Public Works for the City of Auburn.
New language specifies that no charitable organization has exclusive rights to use any public streets, alleys or public rights of way.
As reworked, the ordinance allows “any public agency that has as a temporary program its employees and representatives soliciting charitable donations, to support a bona fide charitable organization, provided such solicitation does not adversely impact public safety.”
And new rules allow police, not the charitable organization or volunteers working on its behalf, to determine what constitutes a risk to public safety at such events.
Reed Astley, a firefighter and a spokesman for the union that represents VRFA firefighters, said Fill the Boot has restricted its activities to the mall parking lot for years.
Monday’s action started in the office of Mayor Nancy Backus. Snyder had first broached the subject a week earlier.
“The main issue here is we are trying to balance the issues of public safety with the City’s interest in supporting the activities of the employees and representatives of public agencies who do occasional or infrequent solicitation activities to support bona fide charitable organizations,” Snyder said.
“We have some instances in our city where we have public agencies or staff that are going to engage in the solicitation of charitable donations for a bona fide charitable organization. We want to support that, and at the same time a key consideration is reenforcing the need for public safety. And so we want to balance those interests by recognizing that this occurs in our city, but we don’t want necessarily to put [charitable organizations] through a difficult process to do that, because it is infrequent and not intended to be an ongoing activity,” Snyder said.
Supportive of the changes, Councilmember Rich Wagner had suggested it might be a good time to take another look at the City’s aggressive panhandling ordinance, to make it more effective while achieving the difficult balancing act of creating rules that pass constitutional muster.
“I was panhandled on the way here in the Safeway parking lot. It just happens all the time,” Wagner said.
Snyder said he and his staff will return with information about aggressive panhandling statutes that others have enacted.
